The Hurrian songs are a collection of music inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient Amorite Canaanite city of Ugarit which date to approximately 1400 BC. One of these tablets, which is nearly complete, contains the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal ,making it the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. While the composers’ names of some of the fragmentary pieces are known, h.6 is an anonymous work.
The complete song is one of about 36 such hymns in cuneiform writing, found on fragments of clay tablets excavated in the 1950s from the Royal Palace at Ugarit (present day Ras Shamra, Syria), in a stratum dating from the fourteenth century BC, but is the only one surviving in substantially complete form. An account of the group of shards was first published in 1955 and 1968 by Emmanuel Laroche, who identified as parts of a single clay tablet the three fragments catalogued by the field archaeologists as RS 15.30, 15.49, and 17.387. In Laroche’s catalogue the hymns are designated h. (for “Hurrian”) 2–17, 19–23, 25–6, 28, 30, along with smaller fragments RS. 19.164 g, j,n, o, p, r, t, w, x, y, aa, and gg. The complete hymn is h.6 in this list.A revised text of h.6 was published in 1975.
To listen to the song go to https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/06/29/43554-2/
