A Clay Tablet at Ugarit Preserves the Oldest Written Melody

During excavations in the 1950s at the Royal Palace of Ugarit, an ancient coastal city at Ras Shamra in northern Syria, archaeologists uncovered fragments of cuneiform clay tablets preserving parts of about three dozen hymns. Dating to approximately 1400 BCE, these artifacts preserved religious hymns written in the Hurrian language. In publications appearing in 1955 and 1968, scholar Emmanuel Laroche joined three separate shards, catalogued as RS 15.30, RS 15.49, and RS 17.387, revealing that they belonged to a single tablet. Designated as hymn h.6 in Laroche's catalogue, this artifact preserves the oldest substantially complete work of notated music known to modern archaeology.

The tablet, now preserved in the National Museum of Damascus, exhibits a deliberate and unusual scribal layout. At the top of the tablet sits the hymn text, separated from the lower sections by a double division line. The poetic lines follow a continuous spiral that wraps across both the recto and verso faces of the clay, a format not attested in standard Babylonian texts. Below the double line appear several rows of musical instructions recorded in the Akkadian language, followed by a single line and an Akkadian colophon. In Anne Draffkorn Kilmer's reading, this scribal note names the tuning as nid qabli, calls the piece a hymn of the gods and says it was copied by a scribe named Ammurapi.