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Instruments of ancient Mesopotamia include harps, lyres, lutes, reed pipes, and drums. While much is known about Mesopotamian instruments, musicologist Carl Engel points out that because the main depictions of musical instruments come from reliefs celebrating royal and religious events, it is likely that there are many instruments, perhaps ...
The Lyres of Ur or Harps of Ur is a group of four string instruments excavated in a fragmentary condition at the Royal Cemetery at Ur in Iraq from 1922 onwards. They date back to the Early Dynastic III Period of Mesopotamia, between about 2550 and 2450 BC, making them the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments. [1]
In Mesopotamia, a balag (or balaĝ) refers both to a Sumerian religious literary genre and also to a closely associated musical instrument.In Mesopotamian religion, Balag prayers were sung by a Gala priest as ritual acts were performed around the instrument.
Tanburs have been present in Mesopotamia since the Akkadian era, or the third millennium BC. [1]Three figurines have been found in Susa that belong to 1500 BC, and in hands of one of them is a tanbur-like instrument. [5]
In 1929, archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley discovered the instruments when excavating the Royal Cemetery of Ur between from 1922 and 1934. They discovered pieces of three lyres and one harp in Ur located in what was Ancient Mesopotamia and now is Iraq. [75] [76] They are over 4,500 years old [77] from ancient Mesopotamia during the ED III. [78]
Instruments not included on this list provide a chance to think about the instruments' evolution. Early Mesopotamian long-necked lutes would have had skin tops and sound-bowls that were either carved from wood or made from a turtle shell. There was a divergence; modern tanburs have wood tops, while rubabs have skin tops.
Unlike Mesopotamia and Egypt, there are no known texts on music theory. The little archaeological evidence that there is consists largely of depictions on ritual vessels and on stone reliefs. Musical instruments or their components are rarely recovered, in comparison with the situation in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Ninigizibara was both the name of a goddess and of individual instruments placed in a number of temples of Inanna. [2] The instrument represented by her was the balaĝ. [4] The precise meaning of this Sumerian term is a matter of scholarly debate, though it is generally accepted that it referred first and foremost to a type of string instrument ...