Top of the Charts in 1400 BCE

August 18, 2022 4:49 PM

Want to hear (a version of) the world's oldest known complete song? Germanic-Nordic experimental folk collective Heilung have recorded a version of the Hymn to Nikkal, a paean to the Moon Goddess Nikkal which is the only complete piece among the 3,400-year-old Hurrian Songs. The songs were inscribed with both words and musical notation in cuneiform on clay tablets, and were excavated from the ancient Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit in northern Syria. Vocalist Maria Franz says "The rhythm in that text is just so weird; it’s so alien. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
posted by kyrademon (29 comments total)

Link no work. Is this a country thing? Live in the U.S.

I want to hear that song.
posted by Max Power at 4:54 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Link also does not work for me in Canada:(
posted by eviemath at 4:55 PM on August 18, 2022

Here's a recording by someone else. And another.
posted by Nelson at 4:55 PM on August 18, 2022

Oof, sorry. It works for me in the UK. My suspicion (because the text below the video says "Released on: 2022-08-19") is that it only becomes available in a country when it's August 19th there.

If it does come online then, I would still recommend listening to it -- they do a very lovely two-part harmony based on one theory of what the notation meant, which seems to be absent from the other versions that have so kindly linked in the comments.
posted by kyrademon at 4:59 PM on August 18, 2022

Here’s yet another version that I found on YouTube in Canada (actual song starts at 4:45)
posted by eviemath at 5:02 PM on August 18, 2022

The last link in the OP seems to include a link to what the first link was supposed to be?
posted by eviemath at 5:03 PM on August 18, 2022

It does? Could you post it? The only Heiling song I can find linked from that article is Anoana, not Nikkal.

Gaaah so sorry about this people.
posted by kyrademon at 5:08 PM on August 18, 2022

The oldest of the Latvian Dainas have vocal melodies going back... pretty far. (I'm sure Heilung is aware of this.)
posted by ovvl at 5:15 PM on August 18, 2022

It's difficult to find a spare, unadorned version of this song that isn't overproduced or swaddled in new age-isms...
posted by misterbee at 5:32 PM on August 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

@kyrademon seems to be correct. Doesn't work for me in North America but it does when I VPN myself over to the UK.
posted by sonofsnark at 5:38 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

The comment about the "alien rhythm to the text" reminds me of a few years ago, when I spent some time doing an audio-only Arabic language program. For quite a while after I started, I kept hearing the divisions between the words in the wrong places. I would know (because I'd been told) that the sentence was simple, like "which way is the hotel," and I'd repeat in Arabic, and then they'd break it down word-by-word and I would have mentally divided it in all the wrong places.

Now take that much language drift and add a few thousand years.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 6:16 PM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

The oldest of the Latvian Dainas have vocal melodies going back... pretty far. (I'm sure Heilung is aware of this.)

I believe there's some uncertainty about their exact origins, but not 3400 years!
posted by praemunire at 6:34 PM on August 18, 2022

I sometimes wonder if someone whose musical tradition antedated the dominance of 4/4 time by thousands of years were transported to the present day and listening to the radio, if they would wonder what had happened to us that we are all singing to ourselves all the time like babies.
posted by mhoye at 7:31 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

An article discussing the hymn and giving a few (very provisional) translations/interpretations is here. Apparently knowledge of the Hurrian language is still pretty limited, but this version by Theo Krispijn is one scholarly attempt:

For the ones that are offering to you (?)
prepare two offering loaves in their bowls, when I am making a sacrifice in front of it.
They have lifted sacrifices up to heaven for (their) welfare and fortune (?).
At the silver sword symbol at the right side (of your throne) I have offered them.
I will nullify them (the sins). Without covering or denying them (the sins), I will bring them (to you), in order to be agreeable (to you).
You love those who come in order to be covered (reconciled).
I have come to put them in front of you and to take them away through a reconciliation ritual. I will honour you and at (your) footstool not....
It is Nikkal, who will strengthen them. She let the married couples have children.
She let them be borne to their fathers.
But the begetter will cry out: "She has not born any child!" Why have not I as a (true) wife born children for you?"

The interpretation seems to be that this hymn is from the perspective of a childless woman supplicating Nikkal for fertility. Note that a general web search for translations of this hymn seems to yield lots of hits for "translations" which seem quite dubious to me.
posted by biogeo at 8:14 PM on August 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

it's quite a sad song, isn't it? Which is so cool, how an artist can write a song that reaches through time to still affect people, thousands of years later.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 8:58 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

That's beautiful.
It sounds familiar to me. I'm going to have to think what it reminds me of.
posted by Zumbador at 9:19 PM on August 18, 2022

The theme, or a version of it, has been adapted in a number of pieces in recent years. If you've played Civilization VI, you might recognize it as Phoenecia's theme, for example.
posted by biogeo at 9:37 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, I can confirm that now that it's 19 Aug in my time zone, the first link now works.
posted by biogeo at 9:38 PM on August 18, 2022

That was really interesting (btw, all links work from Norway).
posted by Harald74 at 10:47 PM on August 18, 2022

What an amazing band! Here's their Bandcamp. I started with Alfadhirhaiti, and am blown away...
posted by rory at 2:33 AM on August 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Do you want to summon the Third Dark Epoch? Because this is how you summon the Third Dark Epoch.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:35 AM on August 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

I suspect kyrademon is right. It didn't work for me in the US yesterday but does today. This is very cool!
posted by Wretch729 at 3:40 AM on August 19, 2022

What an amazing band!

Heilung is phenomenal - I think their current popularity sprang from a very well produced recording of one of their live shows. They come from a similar background as Wardruna and the like, and go the extra mile of actively telling the fash trash (who sometimes attach themselves to neo-trad scenes) to fuck off in no uncertain terms.
posted by FatherDagon at 7:34 AM on August 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

For a song from such a distant culture, both time and space, I was rather shocked how normal it sounded. If I was just hearing the song without all the introductory material about it, I don’t think I would have paid much notice to it. I guess it’s from years of listening to weird music, that my overly stretched ears take most things in without question. But it was a quite beautiful rendition.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:08 AM on August 19, 2022

Of the 3 versions I listened to, the first reminded me of Gregorian plainsong, the second had a middle eastern style, and the third a blending of the two. I didn't feel the rhythm was 'weird' but the three were so different in execution that they hardly sound (to me) to be the same song. The three felt more performance than plea. I'd like to hear it done a capella by an average untrained female singing from memory after her hearing several versions of the song. Seems like that would be the closest and most authentic as you could get to an original petitioner?
posted by BlueHorse at 10:49 AM on August 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

I do think it's useful to keep in mind that all of these recordings were arranged and performed by musicians raised and trained with very different musical aesthetic sensibilities than the original authors and performers of this hymn. It's wonderful and incredible that we have some form of transcription for this incredibly ancient melody, but even modern Western sheet musical notation, which is much more detailed and which we have the advantage of actually completely understanding, leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The modern performances of the Hymn to Nikkal are necessarily going to be at least in part representative of the musical tastes of the modern performers and audiences, rather than purely of the original pieces.

Would a devotee of Nikkal in ancient Ugarit have recognized any of these performances as the same song as the hymn they knew? Would they have liked these versions? Would they have sounded familiar but a bit alien at the same time? There's probably no way we can know.

For myself, I really like all of these modern interpretations of the hymn. They're all very different but beautiful in their own ways. I think Peter Pringle's is maybe my favorite, but this new version by Heilung uses harmony in a way that I really love too. (Their harmony also sounds kind of Gregorian/medieval to me, and I think that particular type of harmony was a very specific cultural development within medieval Europe some 2500 years after the Hymn to Nikkal was written down, so probably would have been very unfamiliar-sounding to an Ugaritic audience, but who knows?)
posted by biogeo at 11:39 AM on August 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's also thrilling to think about the fact that of all the cuneiform tablets like the one the Hurrian Hymn was discovered on, which have been unearthed and collected in museums around the world, only a small fraction have actually been translated. Not because scholars don't know how to translate them, but because there's just not enough people working on the problem to have made a big dent yet. Who knows how many more treasures like this might be sitting in a vault in the British Museum somewhere, just waiting for someone who knows how to read it to take a look?
posted by biogeo at 11:44 AM on August 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

I love stuff like this. I wonder about the daily lives of people who leave these artifacts. Who was it who was writing this song down on that clay tablet? What was their day like? Was it just some routine record-keeping, or was it a passion project? What did they do in their leisure time?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:56 PM on August 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

[The first link didn't work for me yesterday, but it works today.]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 7:14 PM on August 19, 2022