In 1988, Robert Fink published an article in Archaeologica Musica describing how a scholar was able to translate tablets from the ancient Levantine city of Ugarit. These tablets, which date back to about 1,400 B.C., contain a form of musical notation:
For fifteen years Prof. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer puzzled over clay tablets relating to music including some excavated in Syria by French archaeologists in the early '50s. The tablets from the Syrian city of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) were about 3400 years old, had markings called cuneiform signs in the hurrian language (with borrowed akkadian terms) that provided a form of musical notation. One of the texts formed a complete cult hymn and is the oldest preserved song with notation in the world. Finally in 1972, Kilmer, who is professor of Assyriology, University of California, and a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, developed an interpretation of the song based on her study of the notation (fig. 1).
Michael Levy, an expert on the lyre, performed the composition. It sounds like this:
-via Nag on the Lake | Image: Archaeologica Musica