Hurrian Hymn No. 6 (Hymn to Nikkal)

The story

The Hurrian songs, or Hurrian Hymns, are about 36 hymns written in cuneiform on fragments of clay tablets. They were excavated in the 1950s from the Royal Palace at Ugarit, the present-day Ras Shamra on the coast of northern Syria, in a stratum dating from the fourteenth century BCE. Only one survives in substantially complete form: tablet h.6, the Hymn to Nikkal, also called the Hurrian cult hymn or "a zaluzi-prayer to the gods". It is the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world, about a thousand years older than the Seikilos epitaph and the Delphic Hymns.

Emmanuel Laroche published an account of the shards in 1955 and 1968. He recognised that three fragments the field archaeologists had catalogued as RS 15.30, 15.49 and 17.387 belonged to one tablet, and in his catalogue the complete hymn became h.6; a revised text was published in 1975. The tablet sets the Hurrian words at the top, written in a continuous spiral across both sides, a layout not found in Babylonian texts. Below a double line come musical instructions in Akkadian, interval names followed by number signs, and below a single line a colophon in Akkadian naming the piece a zaluzi in the nid qabli tuning, written down by a scribe called Ammurabi. No composer is named for h.6, but four Hurrian composers' names survive on five of the fragments: Tapšiẖuni, Puẖiya(na), Urẖiya and Ammiya.

The words are a religious text about offerings to Nikkal, a goddess of orchards and wife of the moon god. They are hard to read: Hurrian is imperfectly understood, small flakes of the tablet are missing, and the hymn appears to be in a local Ugarit dialect. Hans-Jochen Thiel made the first published attempt at interpreting the text in 1977, and Theo J. H. Krispijn a new but still provisional one 24 years later, after finds near Boğazkale had advanced the study of Hurrian.

The music was meant for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed sammûm, most likely a lyre. In the 1970s the Assyriologist Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and the musicologist Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin worked on the tablets together, finding that related Akkadian tablets described how to tune a Babylonian lyre and named its intervals. The hymn's first modern performance, in 1974, led The New York Times to write that it had revolutionised the whole concept of the origin of western music. The script itself is well understood, but there are at least five rival readings of what the notation means, each giving entirely different music; the first reconstructions even placed the scale upside down.

The tablet is now in the National Museum of Damascus. The hymn is still performed from these reconstructions: the ensemble De Organographia recorded h.6, with fragments of 14 other hymns, in 2006, following the transcriptions of M. L. West.

What it says

A cult hymn for the goddess Nikkal, concerned with offerings made to her. Because the Hurrian of Ugarit is only partly understood and the tablet is damaged, its exact wording remains uncertain.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.