Oldest written song with notation

“Hymn to Nikkal” – also known as “Hurrian Hymn No.6”, “h.6” or “A Zaluzi to the Gods” – was one of a number of texts inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets that were excavated from the Royal Palace of Ugarit, in northern Syria, by French archaeologists in the 1950s. The 30 or so fragments have been dated to around 1400 BCE – towards the end of the Bronze Age. The “Nikkal” tablet, the only one of the texts that had been preserved well enough to allow for modern interpretation, contains song lyrics, musical notation based on a heptatonic diatonic scale, and tuning instructions for a Babylonian nine-string lyre (a stringed instrument). The anonymous composition was revived by scholars at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and published in full in 1968, before being performed for the first time in 1974. “Hymn to Nikkal” is on display in the National Museum of Damascus, Syria.

The haunting love song is dedicated to Nikkal, derived from the Sumerian goddess Ningal (“Great Lady”) and worshipped as the Semitic goddess of orchards and wife of the Mesopotamian moon god Nanna – or, alternatively, the Ugaritic moon god Yarikh, or the Hurrian moon god Kušuḫ (Umbu).

Modern translations of the text have been varied and disputed, owing to difficulties in understanding the long-extinct Hurrian language and, in part, to missing fragments of the clay tablet unearthed in Ugarit, while experts have argued over exactly how – and in which style – the hymn should be performed.

In 2022, the Germanic-Nordic experimental folk group Heilung took up the challenge and recorded “Nikkal” for their third studio album Drif, with vocalist Maria Franz commenting: “The rhythm in that text is just so weird; it’s so alien. I’ve never heard anything like it.”