Canaanite
Lyrist (Megiddo Plaque), Late Bronze Age
Israel Museum (IDAM) 38.780
Drawing by Anne Glynnis Fawkes
The Wisdom of the Lyre: Soundings in Ancient Greece, Cyprus and the Near East
in Hickmann, E./Eichmann, R. (eds.), Serie Studien zur Musikarchäologie, Orient-Archäologie (Berlin, forthcoming)
The tonal material used by the great orchestras of Mesopotamia must
have been driven by the heptatonic tuning cycle which is documented
in the cuneiform tablets published
by Anne Kilmer and others beginning in 1960. Because this cycle was
formulated especially for chordophones, we need not be surprised by
the high status accorded to harps and lyres. Even if these instruments
could be used in low contexts like brothels, they are equally known
to have occupied a chief place in the music of palace and temple. It
is this which accounts for the regular exaltation of these and other
instruments to divine status. They were effectively treated as minor
gods, and accordingly could receive animal sacrifice and other offerings
in their own right.
This fact of divine personification would naturally have opened two
frontiers for poetic elaboration: gods have magic powers, and they can
perform in mythological narratives where they can work musical wonders.
This paper, delivered September 24, 2004 at the biennial meeting of
the International Study Group for Music Archaeology in Michaelstein,
Germany, presents a selective survey and analysis of Greek, Cypriote,
Ugaritic and Mesopotamian evidence about these curious deities, which
have been called ‘the harp gods’, and their super-powers on
lyre and harp: for prophecy, healing, purification, and exorcism. All
of these functions may be regarded as forms of ‘divination’,
if we emphasize the root meaning of the word. Traces of the ritual reality
which engendered the myth-making impulse are also found, early in the
historical record of Greece, but relatively late in the Near Eastern
sequence.
Lyre Gods of the Bronze Age Musical Koine
A revised and more evolved version of the above, with special focus on the religious/cultic dimensions of the phenomenon, will appear in The Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 6.2 (2006), a volume which will contain the proceedings of the conference Greek Religion and the Orient: From Ishtar to Aphrodite, FSU's 2005 Langford Seminar, organized by Ian Rutherford.