World Oldest Musical composition Seikilos epitaph 4K
Channel: Mousike Universe
Date: 2020-08-29

World Oldest Musical composition Seikilos epitaph 4K

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Composed Mohamed Asarudheen

Keyboard Programmed Vishnu Chandran

Editing - Thirumoorthi

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The oldest complete piece of written music and lyrics so far discovered, in HISTORY!

This video features the "Epitaph of Seikilos" - the only COMPLETE example of an Ancient Greek melody with lyrics so far discovered. Although earlier pieces of notated ancient Greek music have been found (for example, a fragment of a chorus from the Athenian tragedian; Euripides’ "Orestes" of 408 BC), or going back even further, to the Bronze Age; the Hurrian Hymns dating to circa 1,400 BC), these are in fragments - the "Epitaph of Seikilos" is UNIQUE, as it is the only

It was written sometime between 2nd Century BC - 1st Century AD. In this video, the song is beautifully sung in the original ancient Greek melody
This song is notated in ancient Greek alphabetical musical notation; in short, above the text of the song, the pitch is indicated by modified ancient Greek alphabetical symbols. The tune is in the ancient Greek Hypophrygian Mode (the equivalent intervals as G-G on the white notes of the piano). Rythm is easily inferred by the corresponding syllables of the text of the song.

The words of the song are: 
Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου 
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ 
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ζην
τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.“

"While you live, shine 
Have not much grief
Life is for a short while
Time requires an end.”

The Seikilos epitaph, carved on a funerary stele from Haydin in Turkey, kept in the National Museum of Copenhagen, is the oldest musical score that has come to us intact. There are more ancient ones (here we published the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, dated about 1400 BC), but they are not complete, or they don’t contain a melody that can be reconstructed with sufficient certainty. Here instead, thanks to the use of the letters of the Greek alphabet, according to the scheme - taken from Wikipedia - reproduced above the title, it is possible to reconstruct the degrees of the Greek scale (formed by two equivalent tetrachords, like our major scale), as well as the accents and the duration of the notes. The tonality is not indicated, and neither is the indication of time. In current transcriptions, ternary times are usually proposed; we however, considered the funeral destination of the melody, preferred to adopt a binary one.