it is awesome that not just images of jesus (we have far too many of these) survive from the middle ages.
Here’s something very special. In the 1950s archeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up 100s of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century. The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process.
Needs more singing, but otherwise quite remarkable.
The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The epitaph has been variously dated, but seems to be either from the 1st or the 2nd century CE. Because of the clear alphabetical notation Seikilos’ song is playable today. Lyre expert and ancient music researchers Michael Levy has a wonderfully virtuoso performance on his YouTube channel for which he uses a wide range of lyre techniques to give it that zesty drinking song vibe.
2015-01-07: Babylonian songs. I’m a sucker for this kind of research. It’s no more than an educated guess, but still remarkable.
But how does one reincarnate music that no human voice has uttered for millennia? A key step was to really understand the language. She carefully studied historical analysis of the stresses and intonations of Babylonian and Sumerian for hints as to how it may have sounded, and researched how language is converted into music in similar Semitic languages.
An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1 ka this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music. However, the task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1 ka ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognize them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.
The sense and sound of ancient Greek music has proved incredibly elusive. This is because the terms and notions found in ancient sources – mode, enharmonic, diesis, and so on – are complicated and unfamiliar. And while notated music exists and can be reliably interpreted, it is scarce and fragmentary. What could be reconstructed in practice has often sounded quite strange and unappealing – so ancient Greek music had by many been deemed a lost art. But recent developments have excitingly overturned this gloomy assessment.
Much of what we think of as Ancient Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was composed to be sung, frequently with the accompaniment of musical instruments. And while the Greeks left modern classicists many indications that music was omnipresent in society – from vases decorated with lyres, to melodic notation preserved on stone – the precise character and contours of the music has long been considered irreproducible. However, the UK Classicist and classical musician Armand D’Angour has spent years endeavoring to stitch the mysterious sounds of Ancient Greek music back together from large and small hints left behind. In 2017, his work culminated in a unique performance at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, intended to recreate the sounds of Greek music dating as far back as Homer’s era – 700 BCE.
Tharun Sekar spends hours building and perfecting the yazh. A distant cousin of the harp, the 2 ka instrument was once a mainstay in royal courts, and produced “the sweetest sound.” Then, it disappeared, preserved only in historical texts—until now.
The yazh is 1 of a handful of lost or obscure folk instruments that Sekar has been recreating. It takes Sekar 6 months to build a yazh. Each handcrafted instrument is made from a solid block of wood, and, when finished, is 60cm tall, with 7 or 14 strings, a distinctively carved peacock head, slender neck, and a bowl-like resonator.
To find the oldest known complete song, you need look back 3400 years. Composed of lyrics, musical notation and tuning instructions for a Babylonian lyre carved into a clay tablet, it is called Hymn to Nikkal, or Hurrian Hymn No 6. Archaeologists found it in the early 1950s – alongside 30 other, incomplete, Hurrian hymns – during an excavation at the Royal Palace of Ugarit in what is now northern Syria. Nikkal, Heilung’s interpretation of Hymn to Nikkal, is the album’s penultimate track. The band based it on the 1984 academic paper A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music by Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, a pioneer of ancient music theory. She believed that the piece contained intervals that, together, form a 2-part harmony. It was a perfect fit for Heilung, with their 2 vocalists. The result is 3 of Drif’s most hypnotic minutes, as otherworldly as it is beautiful.
the Lycurgus Cup is unique. The artisanship this required boggles the mind. The glass makers could not have added such minute amounts of gold and silver just to the glass the cup was going to made out of. These particles are 70 nanometers wide. You can’t even see them with an optical microscope, never mind the human eyeball; you need a transmission electron microscope at least. Experts believe the craftsmen added the minimum possible of the metals and then diluted the glass-melt with more and more glass until they had the proportion right.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 