Ancient Music: The Sumerians (part 4)
This week’s journey through the music of the Sumerians has uncovered a great deal of interesting facets of their practices and ceremony. Genre, gender, instrumentation, tonality, and lyrical content all have archeological record. There are a great deal of writings that describe its purpose, technique, and qualities. What we don’t have is an actual composition to reproduce, and obviously no recordings exist form the time. Sumerians and Akkadians developed writing as a result of the growing complexity that their shared civilizations demanded. The need to facilitate memory as the growing list of complications to survival in the region brought with it a vast knowledge of their cultural rituals. With music, however, the art of creating a complete system of reproduction eluded them. At least, we have no current evidence of their specific music notation, despite the wide range of details they left behind of its other aspects.
It may be that how a song was played was part of the common knowledge, and they saw no reason to specify how an instrument accompanied their songs. Surely, we have other evidence of literature that leaves out what today is critical information, yet when it was documented, the writer felt no need. Perhaps music was considered an intuitive practice, and it was taboo to be overly thorough when writing about it. It’s possible that music’s emotive qualities prevented it from being accurately described through cuneiform, and it wasn’t properly understood how to create a technological development in writing components like pitch, meter, and duration. Maybe, like many undocumented parts of a society, it was still an oral tradition from expert to student. The answers are not yet clear, though, they did write plenty of songs.
The Song of Songs, also known as The Song of Solomon, was for many years considered the oldest love poem until the discovery of the Song of Shu-Sin was discovered and dated to around 2000 B.C. Austin Henry Layard made expeditions in 1845, uncovering many stone tablets containing cuneiform works from tombs in Kalhu. (Joshua Mark, 2014) He was under immense pressure for funding, and to placate public interest, his discoveries were under the presumption that he was unearthing texts supporting physical evidence corroborating the stories in the bible. The Song of Shu-Sin was taken to the Istanbul Museum in Turkey, where it was placed in storage until 1951. Samuel Kramer found it while translating ancient texts and documented his finds in his book, History Begins at Sumer. This piece, along with many other love songs to follow, would create a vast collection of Sumerian poetry, all presumably accompanied by music of which we have no specific documentation. How do we know that instruments were involved?
One key is the cadence through which the narratives are written. If not accompanied by instrumentation, the repetition of phrases surely lends itself to vocalization and singing. There are suggestions of chorus and song structures throughout the songs, and with the many other instances of music accompanying ceremony, it is hard to imagine that these works weren’t sung, or written specifically for singing. While not the only example, The Song of Shu-Sin is a good one for making the presumption that the Sumerians did not just write poetry, they wrote lyrics. Here is the translation from Samuel Kramer (pp246-247)
“Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.
You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.
Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me,
Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies,
My father, he will give you gifts.
Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.”
Repeating words, the sentence structure, and the stanza numbers all lead us to believe that this falls within the realm, if not explicitly for, lyrical poetry. If it weren’t sung, it sure could have been. More evidence that music was the purpose for these creations beyond their religious or ceremonial properties lies in a later work discovered as described by Kramer, “As is clear from the lines quoted above, part of the celebration of the holy marriage rite consisted of “songs that rejoice the heart” accompanied by musical instruments.” (Penn Museum, Vol 5, Issue 1) The comment referring to, “a hymn to Inanna (a Sumerian Goddess of fertility), inscribed on a number of tablets and fragments excavated in Nippur, which closes with the celebration of the holy marriage between the goddess and Iddin-Dagan, a king who reigned a millennium later than Dumuzi, in Sumer’s last dying days when it was being overwhelmed by the Semitic nomads from the west.” Within this work is the following stanzas:
“Paraded abundance, cheer, and plenty before her,
Prepared a goodly feast for her,
Paraded the blackheads before her, (saying):
“With the drum(?) whose speech is louder than the storm,
The sweet-voiced lyre(?), the ornament of the palace,
The harp that soothes the spirit of man,
O singers, let us utter songs that rejoice the hears.”
The king put a hand to the food and drink,
Amaushumgalanna put a hand to the food and drink,
The palace is in song, the king in joy,
By the people sated with plenty,
Amaushumgalanna stands in lasting joy,
May his days be longo n the fruitful throne.”
In later Greek musicology, mathematicians, politicians, and theologians produced details about tonality, intervals, modes, scales, and composition. They explicitly believed music to be within the spheres of other academic practices and not a separate discipline. The cadence of how we speak is as much enbibed within our punctuation as would be the timbre of our voices when reading words of songs. It is possible that because of the genre and presumption of how language was spoken in terms of its pitch and rhythm that it seemed entirely redundant to include specifics about how to say (or sing, in this case) these words. It was only until the separation of the pantheon, and the inclusion of religious practices that were foreign to large sets of the population that the necessity for a system describing musicianship that was no longer common knowledge. The age of Christianity and the church of the middle ages may have spurred the use of neumes as a means to educate a public whose cultural songs, were until that point, built upon a tradition that was completely foreign to the ways of the new practice.
It is still fascinating, that with all of the literature uncovered from this oldest of written civilization about the qualities of music, that an actual score, or something equating to a specific roadmap on the tonal reproduction of their musical practices is incomplete, and left to our presumptions. History is an ongoing exploration, and perhaps these records exist in the archives of Sumer, the Akkad, or even the Babylonians, waiting to be discovered still. Until then, we must rely on the information we have, and allow the knowledge we have at our disposal to provide the necessary inspiration for reproducing this amazing music.
Enjoy today’s listening example of Indus, a modern composition using these ancient lyrics, performed by Dead Can Dance off their album The best of Lisa Gerrard. Thanks for reading!
Resources for this article:
Samuel Kramer, 1962https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-biblical-song-of-songs-and-the-sumerian-love-songs/
Joshua J. Mark, 08-13, 2020https://www.ancient.eu/article/750/the-worlds-oldest-love-poem/
Sumerian Love Songs: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23282370