Tablet U.3011 (handcopy of O. R. Gurney, 1974)
Volume 32 of the Old Babylonian Encyclopaedia
Nabnitu (Creature)

In 1960 Anne Kilmer (Berkeley) published the first of the cuneiform musical tablets. This grew in time to a small corpus of texts, in both Sumerian and Akkadian, on music and music theory. Widely scattered in time and space, these works come from Ur, Nippur, Ugarit, and Assur, and range in date from about the eighteenth century B.C. to the fourth or third, with clear Sumerian antecedents. The tablets reveal a theoretical and practical tradition of astonishing continuity, known across large reaches of the ancient Near East through a cultural network of court and city. Many details of this system remain obscure, but it is clear that the Mesopotamian cultures knew a system of interrelated heptatonic scales as highly refined as those attested so much later in Greece and India. The texts presented here are critical editions I have prepared for my forthcoming book entitled Terpander: The Invention of Music.

U3011 - CBS 10996 - UET 7/74 -
Graphic Representation of the Tuning Cycle

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