Ancient music

Ancient music is music made in early civilizations, including its instruments, performance practices, and theories. It survives chiefly through instruments, images, texts, and fragmentary notation.

Connect

Lyre: A stringed instrument whose strings stretch across a frame and are plucked. Lyres accompanied songs and poetry in Greek and other ancient musical traditions.
Seikilos epitaph: A Greek funerary inscription from the first or second century CE that preserves a complete song with notation. It provides an unusually intact example of an ancient Greek melody and text.
Ancient Greek music: The musical practices and theories of Greek-speaking societies from antiquity. Greek writings preserve unusually extensive discussion of music, performance, and musical structure.
Greek music theory: Ancient Greek accounts of musical intervals, scales, tuning, and the ethical effects of music. Its surviving treatises explain how Greek thinkers organized and interpreted musical sound.
Music of the spheres: The ancient and medieval idea that celestial motions produce a form of inaudible musical harmony. It grew from ancient associations between numerical proportions, music, and cosmic order.
Aulos: An ancient Greek double-pipe wind instrument, usually played with a reed in each pipe. Its piercing sound and paired pipes made it central to Greek performance.
Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal: A fragmentary hymn from Ugarit, usually dated to the second millennium BCE, preserved on a cuneiform tablet. Its damaged notation has prompted competing reconstructions of one of the oldest written songs.
Ancient Egyptian music: The musical practices of ancient Egypt, known through instruments, images, and written sources. Tombs and temples preserve evidence of ensembles, performers, and ritual music.
Pythagorean tuning: A tuning approach that derives musical intervals from simple whole-number frequency ratios. Ancient writers used ratios to explain consonant intervals and musical order.
Ethos in ancient Greek music: The ancient Greek belief that musical forms and performance could shape character and emotion. This idea influenced Greek arguments about music's place in education and civic life.