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In Iraq 30 (1968) I published a fragmentary text from Ur, then numbered 7/80, containing part of a treatise on the tuning of the sammû instrument, and with the collaboration of the musicologist David Wulstan, who himself contributed a companion article, I added an interpretation, with a table showing that the text described seven different tunings, with instructions in two chapters for the conversion of each one to the next, first by lowering, then by raising the pitch of one string by a semitone. The copy of the text was subsequently published again as UET VII 74 and the number 7/80 was abandoned when the tablet was sent to Baghdad and renumbered in the Iraq Museum. This text, usually known as “the tuning text” — a better name would be “retuning text” — provided the decisive clue to the understanding of the Babylonian musical system and its terminology, which have since been expounded by several musicologists and compared with the Greek system of “octave species”. So well established did the theory become that it was applied without question by several scholars when a few years later a tablet apparently containing a musical notation using the same terminology was recognized among the tablets from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Little notice was taken in 1982 when Raoul Vitale wrote an article calling in question the basic assumption of the theory that the tuning system and the scales were upward rather than downward. Only recently has M. L. West proposed in this article “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Human Melodic Texts” (Music and Letters 75/4 [1993], 161–79) that Vitale's theory should be seriously considered.
1 Kilmer, A.D.. The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115 (1971), 131–49Google Scholar; Wulstan, D., The Earliest Musical Notation, Music and Letters 52 (1971), 365–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle, The Human Musical Score from Ugarit; the discovery of Mesopotamian Music, Sources from the Ancient Near East (SANE) 2, fasc. 3 (Malibu 1984)Google Scholar. The six texts known in 1984 are listed by Kilmer, in Iraq 46, 69 ffGoogle Scholar.
2 See Duchesne-Guillemin, loc. cit., 13 ff. with references.
3 La musique suméro-accadienne, gamme et notation musicale, Ugarit-Forschungen 14 (1982), 241–63Google Scholar. His theory was based on the names “thin” and “small” for the third and fourth strings, and on questioning which was the “front” and which the “back” of the instrument. Both these arguments are inconclusive. The front and back of the instruments can hardly be in doubt: in the case of harps, the back is often behind the musician's shoulder; in bull lyres the animal surely faces the front. Thus all such instruments may be regarded as an extension of the player himself.
4 Orientalia 47 (1978), 99 ffGoogle Scholar. The interpretation is highly dubious, depending as it does on (a) the reading NU.SU.U[D], taken to be a phonetic spelling of Sum. n u.s ù.u d “not far”, which does not even conform with the trace of the third sign, and (b) the interpretation of this as a verbal expression meaning “do not extend”.
5 gíd-i = na-sa-[ḫu], txx-lu = ni/ne-e-[um ša pitní], Nabnitu XXXII iii 20–21 (MSL, XVI, 253); zé-zé = g íd-gíd = nu-su-ḫu, Emesal Vocab., MSL IV 38, 114; gíd-i, tu-lu, gi-en-gi-en, zi-zi-i, gá-gá, sú-sú, Proto-lu 622–7 (MSL XII 55); see already Kilmer, in Assyriological Studies 16 (Studies in Honor of Landsberger, B., Chicago 1965), 263 Google Scholar; Krispijn, loc. cit., 5, note on line 160; and CAD ‘N/2’, 198, lexical section. I am also indebted to Professor Krispijn for a draft of his forthcoming article Musik in Keilschrift: Beiträge zur altorientalischen Musikforschung 2, from which I have derived much benefit.
6 š ú-šú (=suḫḫupu) is paired with zi-zi (=nussuḫu) in the Sulgi hymn edited by Krispijn line 160: see also Shaffer, A. in Iraq 43 (1981), 82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggesting this as the origin of the “siḫpu” scales in Nabnitu XXXII. Shaffer's idea was that “throw down” might here have the sense “invert”, but as pointed out by Crocker, in Iraq 46, 84 Google Scholar, this cannot refer to an “inverted” interval in the modern sense, since the context in Nabnitu, and also in the Nippur hymnody fragment N 3354 (below, n. 10), is clearly one of scales, not of intervals. Crocker and Kilmer suggested that the siḫpu scales might have resembled the Byzantine “plagal” scales (Greek πλαϒι -“lying flat”) and the sagrama scales of Indian music, with the keynote in the middle of the scale. But see below, n. 9.
7 Wulstan, , Iraq 30, 221 Google Scholar.
8 Iraq 30, 232 Google Scholar.
9 If this became a common practice among musicians and was extended beyond the išartum, could such “flattened” scales perhaps be the siḫpu scales mentioned above in note 6?
10 See Lawergren, and Gurney, , Iraq 49 (1987), 49–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 N 3354, a fragment from Nippur, published by Kilmer, A. D. and Civil, M., Old Babylonian Instructions Relating to Hymnody, JCS 38 (1986), 94–98 Google Scholar.
12 Crocker, and Kilmer, , The Fragmentary Music Text from Nippur, Iraq 46 (1984), 83–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kilmer, in Nippur at the Centennial (1992), 103 Google Scholar.
13 See especially Kilmer, in Nippur at the Centennial (1992), 101 Google Scholar.
14 See Th. Krispijn, J. H., Beiträge zur altorientalischen Musikforschung: 1. Šulgi und die Musik, Akkadica 70 (1990), and 2 Google Scholar. (forthcoming).
15 Iraq 30, 225 Google Scholar
16 Ibid., 221-2.
17 West, M. L.. Ancient Greek Music (Oxford 1992), 192 Google Scholar.
18 Ibid., 219.
19 Ibid., 230, 256.
