The oldest song in the world was discovered in 1928, when a Syrian farmer was digging on the site of the ancient city of Râs Shamra. In doing so, he came upon a cave containing evidence of a civilisation dating back to the thirteenth century BC. As a result his land became an archaeological dig and, the following year, inscribed clay tablets were found there.
The alphabet represented in the cuneiform writing on the tablets was largely deciphered by 1931. But it was not until 1959 that a professor at the Columbia University College of Letters and Science, Berkeley, California, realised what had been found. The first four lines of script were the lyrics of a song and the rest contained instructions on how to perform it.
Much work remains to the archaeologists. The tablets have been damaged and are incomplete. It's also difficult to establish the exact origins of the people who composed the song and, therefore, what culture it represents. Musicologists, however, can tell that the musical scale used by its composer is similar in form to that used by western musicians today.
In 1972 an eleven-string lyre was made to the pattern of drawings made during an excavation in Iraq in the 1920s. Then, in 1974, the song was sung to accompaniment before an audience at Berkeley University. It is not yet clear what its correct rhythm should be, so the performance was given in even crotchets. The lyrics are sacred, or semi-sacred, relating to the loves and behaviour of the gods.
