Ancient Music: The Sumerians (part 2)
The Sumerians were not a specific nationality, but rather a loosely connected group of city-states that co-existed in the same region. They lived in close proximity to the Akkadians, and because of the co-mixing of these civilizations, many technological developments came about to facilitate the survival of such large settlements. Irrigation, farming, labor, and communication all transformed, and it is from these necessities that the first types of written language develop. This new way of life was recognized as a division between those that still lived in the mountains and seen as animalistic or barbarous. Those that dwelled in cities and participated in this new organized way of life saw a rift growing between these two cultures.
Music provided a compelling connection to the pre-city dwelling ways of their ancestors. Many of the instruments documented and pictured in artifacts display animals or have written talk about their resemblance to animal sounds. Our knowledge of what Sumerian instruments looked like is limited, but what we have recovered projects their reverence. A decorative, inlaid panel from the third phase of the Early Dynastic Period (2600-2350 B.C.) shows portrayals of bulls, bears, lions, gazelles, big cats, deer, and an assortment of domesticated animals in reference to music’s association with the nature. The Nar was a practitioner of music, typically an individual that sang for the temple. There is an association recognized between the scribe and the Nar, as Ben Alster notes in his writings of Sumerian Proverbs, “the art of the scribe and that of the singer appear as two different professions, yet linked together, presumably as two levels of the same education.” (Alster p. 363 in his collections known as SP 2). The cuneiform symbol for Nar is derived from an animal head, and the same sign can be read as “fox”. This shared graphic expression is described as a possible pun by Jack Cheng and his explorations into the ethnomusicological research of Sumerians and its ties to animals. The “fox/musician’ can be explored as individuals who took music and transformed the advances of Sumerian culture, reconnecting it to the barbarism of nature.
There are two significant limitations to our understandings of Sumerian music. One being the small sample of early instruments and their size in comparison to the societies which they have now come to represent. The other is the lack of documentation relating to the rhythm or context of our musical observations, themselves. The latter, being prominent in our ability to actually reproduce the sounds of Sumerian songs. We lack the context in which our knowledge exists, relying only on inferences in order to reproduce what we assume their music sounded like. This is analogous to language in that knowing the words of a language is not helpful unless you know the order and cadence in which they are spoken. We have archaeological and documented knowledge of what instruments Sumerians played, even how they were tuned and what notes they likely possessed, but because we have not discovered any indication of the meter, tempo or specific order of the pitches, our reproductions are based on assumptions. Researcher Anne Kilmer at the Penn Museum concludes that “All we have to go on are the intervals and the tunings, which are as “modern” as they are “ancient” (and as universal). Because the structure of the ancient human ear was the same as our own, Mesopotamians heard the consonances of the octaves, the fifths, and the fourths as readily as we do.” (Kilmer, 1998). Percussion instruments, like bronze clappers, kettle drums, and wooden scrapers indicate that rhythm was certainly present, but as of yet we have no indication that it was documented in the manner that written notation exists today.
This does not mean that we are empty handed. There is ample descriptions indicating what strings were to be used during sections of songs. There are also orders of string pairings that exist, suggestion structure and repetition of, at the very least, a compositional expectation that was present. Anne Kilmer has additional writings for the American Philosophical Society (1971) about several specific mathematical cuneiform tablets that were discovered to have principles of Sumerian music theory in their texts. These include details on the “Babylonian Treatise on the Tuning of the Harp”, a tablet in their collection with a full list of the intervals found in modes for “breast” songs (or love songs), and several other details about the structure and function of tonal practices in Sumerian music.
The other important factor to consider is the above-mentioned limitation of small sample sizes. Much of this understanding of what Sumerian instruments looked like from this Early Dynastic Period comes from an excavation in the city of Ur by Europeans in the mid-19th century. The site is a Royal Tomb, and the contents are of an exceedingly minor segment of the population. Two harps and nine lyres provide the only evidence thus far of what stringed instruments from the Sumer-Babylonian regions looked like. This find, along with a pair of silver wind instruments is a narrow perspective of what the larger musical expression may have been, but are important lenses, nonetheless. Even though these discoveries are limited, there mere existence indicates that music, and the scholarship of music, was a large part of the earliest civilizations that we have on record. It also points to the partnerships that musical expression maintained with the societal representations of everyday life, and the desire for humanity to voice connectivity with nature through sonic artistic endeavors.
Today, this principle of staying connected to the world around us is still incredibly evident in the music that we write. The digital and internet ages are prime examples of how closely song and sound follows our evolutionary trends. Perhaps one day, our ancestors will recover the remnants of a turntable, laptop, or cellphone and come across the same elusive conundrums that we now experience when trying to unwrap the mysteries of musical documentation engulfed within the technologies that it was ensconced with. For the Sumerians, this enigma continues, although new discoveries are happening all the time. Enjoy the listening example of some modern conjecture as to what these ancient songs may have sounded like. Here is Music of the Ancient World, a sample from the ensemble De Organographia.
You can read more about them here: http://www.northpacificmusic.com/Greeks.html.