Curated texts / Music
Music
Texts about making music in Mesopotamia: laments sung by the kalû-priests to drum and harp, a catalogue of the lamenters' repertoire, and an Old Babylonian liturgy with its song sections. The English is an unedited machine draft; instrument names (balaĝ = harp or drum; ub, lilis) are rendered inconsistently. The famous tuning and notation tablets have no transliteration in our corpus yet; they are listed below as coming soon.
Machine drafts. Every English quotation here is unedited output of an ATF-to-English model, not a scholarly translation. Each card names its source; cards marked machine English only come from sources (eBL) whose transliterations we do not republish.
6 tablets
Liturgy (Manchester Memoirs 48, pl. 1-7)
Manchester Memoirs 48 pl.1-7 · Sippar-Yahrurum (mod. Tell Abu Habbah) ? · Old Babylonian“Who knows your fate, who knows your fate?”line 5
A literary liturgy published in the Manchester Memoirs; machine English for most lines.
Read the tablet →Balaĝ lament to Ningirsu (K 4427)
K.4427 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“he (Ningirsu) has made the holy ub and holy lilis holy for him”line 20
Neo-Assyrian copy of a Sumerian balaĝ lament that names the ub and lilis drums.
Read the tablet →Lament of the balaĝ drum (K 5040)
K.5040 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“When you speak to the storm, the balag drum of lamentation and lamentation, how long will it last?”line 16'
Sumerian Emesal lament with Akkadian translation, from Nineveh.
Read the tablet →Bilingual lament with tigi song (K 5167)
K.5167 · Uruk · Neo-Babylonian“The naggala demon, the nagbura demon, will serve you with tigi.”line 3'
Sumerian–Akkadian lament (Uruk) mentioning the tigi song.
Read the tablet →Bilingual lament with Ashurbanipal's colophon (K 4629)
K.4629 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“On the bank of the Ezida, the temple of Nabû that is inside Nineveh, my lord, I built.”line 64
Long Sumerian–Akkadian lament from Nineveh, ending with the library colophon of Ashurbanipal.
Read the tablet →Catalogue of laments and prayers (K 2529)
K.2529 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“The Abzu is pure and Dilmun is pure”line 2
Nineveh tablet listing the incipits of balaĝ and eršemma laments with a total for each god. The machine English garbles the totals (e.g. “total: 39th year of Enlil” for a count of 39 compositions).
Read the tablet →
Coming soon
These tablets have no transliteration in our corpus yet, so there is nothing to translate. We list them so you know they are on the way.
CBS 10996: string-names and tuning text
CBS 10996 (OrNS 29, 273) · Nippur · Middle BabylonianLists the nine strings of a lyre and pairs of strings used for intervals. A transliteration is being sought; nothing is shown until we have one.
UET 7, 74: retuning a lyre
UET 7, 74 (U 7/80; duplicate UET 6/3, 899 = P346936) · Ur · Old BabylonianInstructions for retuning a nine-string instrument step by step from one tuning to the next. A transliteration is being sought; nothing is shown until we have one.
Hurrian hymn h.6: the oldest notated melody
RS 15.30 + 15.49 + 17.387 (h.6) · Ugarit · Late Bronze Age (c. 1400–1200 BCE)A hymn to the goddess Nikkal with musical instructions below the text. Our corpus has its catalogue entry only; a transliteration is being sought.
KAR 158: catalogue of songs
KAR 158 · Assur · Middle AssyrianA catalogue of song incipits grouped by genre and instrument. A transliteration is being sought.
MS 5105: number grid read as music notation
Schøyen MS 5105 · find-spot unknown · Old BabylonianA school tablet with columns of numbers that has been interpreted as scales for a lute. A transliteration is being sought.