The Music Of The Ancient Near East

The elements of music, musical values, the relationship of music to the other ancient arts--all of these subjects are explored as Polin discusses the musical heritage of the ancient Near East.

Music in Religious Cults of the Ancient Near East presents the first extended discussion of the relationship between music and cultic worship in ancient western Asia. The book covers ancient Israel and Judah, the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Elam, and ancient Egypt, focusing on the period from approximately 3000 BCE to around 586 BCE. This wide-ranging book brings together insights from ancient archaeological, iconographic, written, and musical sources, as well as from modern scholarship. Through careful analysis, comparison, and evaluation of those sources, the author builds a picture of a world where religious culture was predominant and where music was intrinsic to common cultic activity.

'This volume is a massive leap forward over any previous synthesis of the subject and includes at the very minimum so much information that its academic and scientific value is self evident. The freshness and profundity of Dumbrill's approach to the subject exceeds anything attempted before. 'The mythology of ancient Mesopotamia proves readable as tonal allegory when its numerology is decoded as tuning theory. By the third millennium BC both pentatonic and heptatonic tunings were quantified throughout the entire 12-tone gamut. Richard Dumbrill has documented the massive empirical experience with strings and pipes that makes this early musicalization of the universe believable.' The volume consists in 4 parts with foreword by Prof. Ernest McClain. The first is about the decipherment, translation and interpretation of the few theoretical cuneiform texts dating from the Old Babylonian period, about 2000 BC, to Neo Assyrian up to the mid first millennium BC. Dumbrill undertakes comparative analyses and criticism of various interpretations having preceded his own and introduces new material. The second part is about the Hurrian hymns, the earliest music ever written, circa 1400 BC, and are produced in their integrality. Attempts to the interpretation of Hymn H.6 are compared and followed by Dumbrill's methodology and interpretation. Each fragment of the collection is analyzed separately. The part concludes with statistical analyses attempting at the reconstruction of some Hurrian rules of composition. The third part consists in the organology with relevant philology and is the largest collection of the Mesopotamian instrumentarium. The last part is a unique lexicon of all known Mesopotamian terminology, with quotation of texts in which the philology appears. The book had been previously published under the title of 'The Musicology and Organology of the Ancient Near East' and now appears under its new title.

This study provides an account of the theory, organology and philology of the music of the ancient Near East. It covers research undertaken since 1960 when cuneiform tablets containing theoretical material and music were discovered and deciphered.

An authoritative guide to the whole of the cradle of civilization.

Music in Religious Cults of the Ancient Near East presents the first extended discussion of the relationship between music and cultic worship in ancient western Asia. The book covers ancient Israel and Judah, the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Elam, and ancient Egypt, focusing on the period from approximately 3000 BCE to around 586 BCE. This wide-ranging book brings together insights from ancient archaeological, iconographic, written, and musical sources, as well as from modern scholarship. Through careful analysis, comparison, and evaluation of those sources, the author builds a picture of a world where religious culture was predominant and where music was intrinsic to common cultic activity.