Hurrian Hymn No. 6 (h.6): Hymn to Nikkal
The world's oldest substantially preserved notated melody — a cult hymn to the moon-god's consort Nikkal, recorded on a clay tablet from Ugarit c. 1400 BCE in the Hurrian language.
About the Tablet
The text known as Hurrian Hymn No. 6 (or h.6) is the most complete of approximately 36 hymnic compositions recovered in 1950 from the royal palace at Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria), inventoried as tablet RS 15.30 + 15.49 + 17.387. It dates to c. 1400 BCE.
It is justly famous as the oldest known piece of music for which both the melody and the lyrics survive — and indeed the only one of the Ugarit hymns preserved well enough for the music to be reconstructed at all. The melody is notated in Akkadian musical terminology (intervals named after pairs of strings on a nine-string lyre — nīd qabli, išartum, kitmum, etc.) below a Hurrian-language hymn-text addressed to Nikkal, the Semitic moon-goddess and consort of the moon-god Yarikh (Sumerian Nanna / Akkadian Sîn).
The reconstruction of the music remains scholarly contested — there are at least four competing interpretations (Kilmer, Duchesne-Guillemin, Vitale, Dumbrill, Krispijn). The text itself is also partly obscure because Hurrian is still imperfectly understood.
The Hurrian Text (Transliteration)
The text is written in cuneiform syllabic Hurrian. Following the standard edition (Laroche, Ugaritica V, 1968; Güterbock, 1970), the first lines run:
(1) a-ta-aḫ-ḫa-aš-ta a-li-it-ta (2) nu-ú-ḫa-aš-ta ti-ta-an-na-pí-en (3) za-zi-na ku-uk-ku-ub-bi (4) za-ar-pí-iš-ša u-pu-uš-ša (5) ḫi-ša-mu-uš-ḫa-am-ma a-am-ma-ti-eš…
(Numbers refer to lines on the obverse; cuneiform sign-by-sign edition in Laroche.)
Below the text, separated by a horizontal ruling, is the musical notation, e.g.:
qáb-li-te 3 ir-bu-te 1 qáb-li-te 3 ša-aḫ-ri 1 i-šar-te 10 uš-ta-ma-a-ri
These are interval-names followed by numbers — most modern interpreters take the numbers as repetition counts, the names as dyads (pairs of strings) producing a harmonic sequence.
A Tentative English Reading
Hurrian translation is uncertain; the most influential English reconstruction (Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, 1975/1984, used here for the sense only) gives roughly:
Once I have endeared the deity, she will love me in her heart, the offering I bring may wholly cover my sin, bringing sesame oil may work on my behalf in awe may I… (The sterile may they make fertile, grain may they bring forth. She, the wife, will bear children to the father. May she who has not yet borne children bear them.)
(Translation: M. Duchesne-Guillemin, “A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit,” Sources from the Ancient Near East 2/2 (Malibu: Undena, 1984). Note: this rendering is one scholar’s interpretation and not a consensus.)
The Music
The notation below the lyrics encodes a sequence of dyads (two-note intervals) drawn from the seven-mode Mesopotamian tuning system attested also in CBS 10996 and UET VII 74. The most cited reconstruction is Anne Draffkorn Kilmer’s (1974, 1976), which produces a roughly seven-note diatonic melody — a finding of striking importance for the prehistory of Western music theory, since it suggests that something like the diatonic scale was already in use in the Late Bronze Age Near East, a millennium before Pythagoras.
The Wikipedia article on Hurrian songs links to several audio reconstructions (Kilmer/Crocker; Dumbrill).
Why This Hymn Matters
- Oldest notated melody in the world (c. 1400 BCE).
- Earliest evidence for diatonic tuning — string-pair names in Akkadian theory correspond to specific intervals (fifth, fourth, third, etc.).
- A Hurrian-language religious text — Hurrian literature is sparse, and Nikkal-cult evidence from Ugarit ties the city’s Semitic moon-goddess worship into the wider Anatolian-Mesopotamian-Levantine religious network.
Sources & Citations
- Edition (text + notation): Emmanuel Laroche, “Documents en langue hourrite provenant de Ras Shamra,” Ugaritica V (Paris: Geuthner, 1968), pp. 462–496 — the standard editio princeps.
- Musical reconstruction: Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “The Cult Song with Music from Ancient Ugarit: Another Interpretation,” Revue d’Assyriologie 68 (1974), 69–82; A. D. Kilmer, R. L. Crocker, R. R. Brown, Sounds from Silence (Berkeley: Bit Enki Publications, 1976).
- Alternative reconstruction: Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music, Sources from the Ancient Near East 2/2 (Malibu: Undena, 1984).
- Online overview & audio: Wikipedia — Hurrian songs (links to multiple modern audio reconstructions)
- Photo of the tablet: RS 15.30 is held by the National Museum, Damascus. Image and discussion at the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) and the Louvre Department of Near Eastern Antiquities (Ugarit collection).
- Hurrian linguistics: Ilse Wegner, Einführung in die hurritische Sprache (Harrassowitz, 2007).