The Epitaph, by Seikilos (abt. 150 CE)
Music as artifact
Imagine living a couple thousand years from now, and going on an archaeological dig in the ruins of some ancient city. Des Moines, Iowa, for example.1 And there you find a flat circle of plastic. It has faded markings on one side, but the other is blank and has a sort of rainbow sheen. How long do you think it might take you to decide that music is encoded on the blank side of that disc, assuming no one has seen a compact disc in hundreds of years?
When they unearthed this stele in what is now Turkey in 1883, I wonder how long they took to figure out that it was a piece of music - the oldest complete composition known to human history, dated to about 150 A.D.
If you visit the Wikipedia article, you can see that much scholarly effort has gone into deciphering the words and the musical notation. Debates about the proper translation continue, but the gist of the song is apparent:
"As long as you live,
Let the world see you,
and don't make yourself miserable;
Life is short, and
Time demands his due"
The song means Y.O.L.O.
Here’s vlogger Hank Green doing his version a few years ago:
When I was a kid, I was taught that the earliest music was Church music - and since I was raised as a Christian, the assumption was that this meant Christian music. However, you can see that this ancient song was not only not Christian, but that it belonged to an entire culture that existed outside of Christianity’s influence. That was mind-blowing to me when I first learned about it.
The Epitaph’s existence and modern interpretations like Hank’s also make me think about how our modern perspective is biased towards thinking that our musical skills are somehow better than what came before us. We tend to think that because we see modern musicians working with modern tools and instruments, or writing music using compositional techniques developed over the last several centuries, ancient humans couldn’t have made anything as good as we make today. Our problem is that without recordings (or writing about musicians from the time) we have no way of ever knowing how skilled early musicians might have been. Or what their music sounded like.
Figuring out what early music may have sounded like means making guesses. even with a written piece, like the Epitaph of Seikilos, or earlier, incomplete Sumerian songs (which Hank mentioned in his video) we are only seeing a slim sampling of what survived - we have no idea how much or how varied the music of their contemporaries might have been.
I have my own musical artifact - a mug I received as a gift eons ago. You can tell who among your friends can and can’t read music with a mug like this, because if they laugh, they can read music; and if they ask if it’s a real song, they probably can’t.
It amuses me to think that if this mug survives and is preserved for two thousand years, future scholars might puzzle it out and recreate this “music” to try to learn what the music of our time was like. You know how varied our musical traditions are, and you know that almost nothing in our musical body of works sounds like this; but if all of the digital copies are lost, the vinyl degrades, the magnetic tape disintegrates, and the paper sheet music crumbles, this one surviving mug could lead those future scholars to think that our civilization’s music sounded like this:
Apologies for the gratuitous Dead Milkmen reference. I was feeling silly.