Michael Levy: Hurrian Hymn No. 6
This is my entry for Kevin’s No Theme Thursday. I don’t write stories or poems, so I thought I would use this image for a song post. The image makes me think of Gregorian chants, and that made me think about the Hurrian Hymns. The Hurrian Hymns are the oldest surviving collection of notated music in the world. Inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets around 1400 B.C., this ancient collection of music was excavated in the 1950s in Syria. The most famous of the Hymns is the Hymn to Nikkal, commonly referred to as h.6. Tablet h.6 contains the lyrics for a hymn to the goddess of orchards with instructions for a singer to be accompanied by an early type of lyre – a nine-stringed instrument called a sammûm. There are some controversies around how to perform and translate the music, and several performances have been recorded since the first in 1974, but the fact that we can even attempt to perform written music from 3500 years ago is astounding.
To learn more about the Hurrian Hymns, check out the Wikipedia article.
To listen to more songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.
The Radio Faux Show 
That really IS astounding!
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I am pretty obsessed with history like this. I feel like most people think that the people who lived thousands of years ago were primitive fools, when in fact they weren’t much different than us now. Music is the great connector across hundreds of generations of humankind.
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This stuff fascinates me.
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I know, right? I don’t remember when I first heard of these, but I love history that shows our connections to the past like this.
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Ancient Prog. 🙂 But I agree about the history, especially because I’ve always felt that music is almost as necessary as oxygen, and has always been.
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This is fantastic. I know very little about chants, but that was what I was thinking of when I generated the pic. Welcome to NTT and thank you 🙏
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I’m excited to join in the fun!
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Very happy to have you! 🤘
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