Music and Arts

The material and spiritual achievements of the Sumerian civilization were also accompanied by an extensive development of the performing arts.

A team of scholars from the University of California at Berkeley made news in March 1974 when they announced that they had deciphered the world’s oldest song.

They read and actually played the musical notes written on a cuneiform tablet from 1800 BC found at Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast (now in Syria).

The Berkeley team explained: “We always knew that there was music in the earlier Assyrio-Babylonian civilization, but until this deciphering we did not know that it had the same heptatonic-diatonic scale that is characteristic of contemporary Western music, and of Greek music of the first millennium B.C.”

Until now it was thought that Western music originated in Greece.

Western music—as so much else of Western civilization—originated in Mesopotamia.

The Greek scholar Philo had already stated that the Mesopotamians were known to “seek worldwide harmony and unison through the musical tones.”

Music and song must also be claimed as a Sumerian “first.”

Professor Crocker could play the ancient tune only by constructing a lyre like those which had been found in the ruins of Ur.

Texts from the second millennium B.C. indicate the existence of musical “key numbers” and a coherent musical theory; and Professor Kilmer herself wrote earlier (The Strings of Musical Instruments: Their Names, Numbers and Significance) that many Sumerian hymnal texts had “what appear to be musical notations in the margins.”

“The Sumerians and their successors had a full musical life,” she concluded. No wonder, then, that we find a great variety of musical instruments—as well as of singers and dancers performing—depicted on cylinder seals and clay tablets.

Like so many other Sumerian achievements, music and song also originated in the temples. But, beginning in the service of the gods, these performing arts soon were also prevalent outside the temples. Employing the favorite Sumerian play on words, a popular saying commented on the fees charged by singers: “A singer whose voice is not sweet is a ‘poor’ singer indeed.”

Many Sumerian love songs have been found; they were undoubtedly sung to musical accompaniment. Most touching, however, is a lullaby that a mother composed and sang to her sick child:

What is striking about such music and songs is not only the conclusion that Sumer was the source of Western music in structure and harmonic composition.

No less significant is the fact that as we hear the music and read the poems, they do not sound strange or alien at all, even in their depth of feeling and their sentiments.

As we contemplate the great Sumerian civilization, we find that not only are our morals and our sense of justice, our laws and architecture and arts and technology rooted in Sumer, but the Sumerian institutions are so familiar, so close. At heart, it would seem, we are all Sumerians.

After excavating at Lagash, the archaeologist’s spade uncovered Nippur, the onetime religious center of Sumer and Akkad. Of the 30,000 texts found there, many remain unstudied to this day. At Shuruppak, schoolhouses dating to the third millennium B.C. were found.

At Ur, scholars found magnificent vases, jewelry, weapons, chariots, helmets made of gold, silver, copper, and bronze, the remains of a weaving factory, court records—and a towering ziggurat whose ruins still dominate the landscape.

At Eshnunna and Adab the archaeologists found temples and artful statues from pre-Sargonic times. Umma produced inscriptions speaking of early empires. At Kish monumental buildings and a ziggurat from at least 3000 BC were unearthed.

Uruk (Erech) took the archaeologists back into the 4th millennium BC. There they found the first colored pottery baked in a kiln, and evidence of the first use of a potter’s wheel.

A pavement of limestone blocks is the oldest stone construction found to date. At Uruk the archaeologists also found the first ziggurat—a vast man-made mound, on top of which stood a white temple and a red temple.

The world’s first inscribed texts were also found there, as well as the first cylinder seals. Of the latter, Jack Finegan (Light from the Ancient Past) said, “The excellence of the seals upon their first appearance in the Uruk period is amazing.” Other sites of the Uruk period bear evidence of the emergence of the Metal Age.

In 1919, H. R. Hall came upon ancient ruins at a village now called El-Ubaid.

The site gave its name to what scholars now consider the first phase of the great Sumerian civilization. Sumerian cities of that period—ranging from northern Mesopotamia to the southern Zagros foothills-produced the first use of clay bricks, plastered walls, mosaic decorations, cemeteries with brick-lined graves, painted and decorated ceramic wares with geometric designs, copper mirrors, beads of imported turquoise, paint for eyelids, copper-headed “tomahawks,” cloth, houses, and, above all, monumental temple buildings.

Farther south, the archaeologists found Eridu—the first Sumerian city, according to ancient texts. As the excavators dug deeper, they came upon a temple dedicated to Enki, Sumer’s God of Knowledge, which appeared to have been built and rebuilt many times over. The strata clearly led the scholars back to the beginnings of Sumerian civilization: 2500 B.C., 2800 B.C., 3000 B.C., 3500 B.C.

Then the spades came upon the foundations of the first temple dedicated to Enki. Below that, there was virgin soil-nothing had been built before. The time was circa 3800 B.C. That is when civilization began.

It was not only the first civilization in the true sense of the term. It was a most extensive civilization, all-encompassing, in many ways more advanced than the other ancient cultures that had followed it. It was undoubtedly the civilization on which our own is based.

Having begun to use stones as tools some 2,000,000 years earlier, Man achieved this unprecedented civilization in Sumer circa 3800 B.C.

The perplexing fact about this is that to this very day the scholars have no inkling who the Sumerians were, where they came from, and how and why their civilization appeared.