Music History I: Ancient to Baroque
Course 1 · Chapter 1 · Music Before Notation: Ancient & Prehistoric Music
Every other course this site has generated about the ancient world had one real advantage music history does not: something durable to actually look at. A pot, a statue, a stone temple survives; a sound, once made, is simply gone. This chapter's own central discipline is being honest about exactly how little survives, and how much genuine uncertainty even the oldest surviving evidence still carries.
The Oldest Known Musical Instruments
The single best-confirmed prehistoric musical instrument is the Hohle Fels flute, discovered in a cave in southwestern Germany and published in the journal Nature in June 2009. Carved from a vulture's wing bone, with a V-shaped mouthpiece and five finger holes, it is real, physical evidence of a musical tradition already well-established roughly 42,000 years ago — right around the time modern humans first colonised Europe.
The Divje Babe Flute
Slovenia · c. 43,000 years old · genuinely disputed
A fragment of a juvenile cave bear's femur, pierced with regularly spaced holes, found in a Slovenian cave associated with Neanderthal remains. If genuine, it would be the oldest musical instrument ever found, and evidence that Neanderthals — not just modern humans — made music. But the honest, real scholarly picture is unsettled: researchers remain genuinely divided over whether this is a deliberately made instrument at all, or simply a bone gnawed by a carnivore's teeth in a pattern that happens to resemble regular holes.
Better-confirmed, later evidence includes bone flutes from Eynan-Mallaha in modern Palestine, dated to roughly 10,730–9760 BCE, and Chinese gudi bone flutes from around 7000 BCE — genuinely old enough to predate writing itself by millennia, and still, remarkably, playable today.
The First Written Music: The Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal
Every instrument covered so far tells us music existed, but not what it actually sounded like. That changes, partially, with a clay tablet excavated in the 1950s from the royal palace at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria), dated to roughly 1400 BCE.
Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal (Hurrian Hymn No. 6)
Ugarit · c. 1400 BCE · the oldest substantially complete work of notated music known to survive
The tablet carries the Hurrian-language lyrics of a hymn addressed to Nikkal, an ancient goddess of orchards, with performance instructions written below in Akkadian for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed
sammûm — most likely a lyre.
⚠ A Real, Unresolved Scholarly Dispute
Knowing the tablet contains real musical instructions is not the same as knowing what the music actually sounded like. Real, documented scholarship reports at least five genuinely rival decipherments of the tablet's own notation, each producing an entirely different reconstructed melody — disagreements centre on how to interpret paired interval names and numerals, and whether repeated syllables in the text mark a refrain or are simply a scribal continuity device. There is no single, agreed-upon "correct" performance of the oldest surviving substantially complete piece of written music — only several genuinely competing scholarly reconstructions.
Ancient Music Theory: A Real Misattribution
The mathematical relationships behind musical harmony — that an octave corresponds to a 2:1 ratio, a perfect fifth to 3:2, a perfect fourth to 4:3 — are still widely taught today as "Pythagorean tuning," after the 6th-century-BCE Greek philosopher Pythagoras.
🔗 A Real Correction
This attribution is genuinely, documentedly a misattribution. The underlying system of ratios traces back to ancient Mesopotamia, not Greece at all — the ancient Greeks themselves borrowed much of their own music theory, including this tuning system and the diatonic scale, directly from Mesopotamian sources. The popular explanatory story behind Pythagoras's own supposed discovery — that he passed a blacksmith's forge, heard hammers of different sizes striking anvils in harmonious combinations except one, and rushed inside to test them — is explicitly presented in real historical scholarship as legend, not documented fact, with no contemporary source actually confirming the story ever happened. Real historians remain broadly sceptical of how much of the mathematics popularly credited to Pythagoras he personally contributed at all.
What Survives, and How Certain We Can Be
| Evidence | Real Age | Certainty |
|---|
| Hohle Fels flute | ~42,000 years | Confirmed genuine instrument |
| Divje Babe flute | ~43,000 years | Genuinely disputed — possibly a chewed bone, not an instrument |
| Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal | ~3,400 years | Genuine notated music; melody itself has at least 5 rival reconstructions |
| "Pythagorean" tuning ratios | Pre-6th century BCE (Mesopotamian origin) | Real ratios; popularly misattributed origin story |
1. Why does an instrument being found at an archaeological site not automatically prove it was used to make music, as the Divje Babe controversy shows?
2. What does it mean for a piece of music to have "at least five rival decipherments" — is the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal one real song, or several genuinely different possible songs?
3. Why might a mathematically real and useful discovery (musical ratios) still end up popularly credited to the wrong person or culture?
Quick Reference
- Hohle Fels flute (Germany, ~42,000 years): the best-confirmed prehistoric musical instrument
- Divje Babe flute (Slovenia, ~43,000 years): genuinely disputed as a real instrument
- Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal (Ugarit, ~1400 BCE): the oldest substantially complete notated melody, with real, unresolved interpretive disputes
- "Pythagorean" tuning (2:1, 3:2, 4:3 ratios): genuinely originates in Mesopotamia; the Pythagoras attribution and the blacksmith legend are real, documented misattributions/legend
Next chapter: Gregorian Chant & Medieval Sacred Music — where Western music's own first large, coherently notated tradition finally gives us music we can reconstruct with real confidence.