The Global
Economy of Music
in the Ancient Near East
forthcoming in J.
Westenholz (ed.),
The
Sounds of Music: Instruments from the Ancient World
(Jerusalem, Keter Press)
Neo-Assyrian palace ensemble
Drawing by Anne Glynnis Fawkes
The
cosmopolitan standards of royal ideology and cultural attainment which
David, Solomon and their successors strove to emulate can be traced
back in part ultimately to the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia when,
in the last centuries of the third millennium, the dynasties of Akkad
and Ur III established perennial models of kingship and empire. These
powers in their turn stood at the pinnacle of an ancient cultural
tradition whose magnificence is clear from the Royal Cemetery of Ur and
its finds (c.2600). It is very telling that Hebrew borrowed words for
both ‘palace’ and ‘throne’ from Mesopotamia. As regards music, all of
these states, and their contemporaries and successors of any standing,
had sophisticated systems for the training and management of palace and
temple musicians. Here as in other areas the Sumerians long maintained
a prestigious cultural edge. Most revealing is the adoption of gala and nar—respectively
‘lamentation priest’ and the more versatile
‘singer-musician’ or ‘singer-priest’—into Akkadian as kalu and naru;
these persisted throughout second and first millennium Mesopotamia, in
both Babylonia and Assyria, as standard professional titles. One may
conclude that, despite considerable differences of pantheon and
liturgy, by the late third millennium the offices of ritual-music came
to be executed and managed bureaucratically in a very similar manner
among both Sumerian- and Akkadian-speaking populations.
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