Link: http://io9.com/musicians-recreation-of-ancient-sumerian-songs-will-hau-1676603467
Soundcloud: https://m.soundcloud.com/newsweek-tech-science
Apparently these people didn’t watch Evil Dead. You don’t read things written in dead languages, certainly you don’t sing them!
Apkallu from the Fortress of Sargon
The Apkallu are seven Sumerian sages, demigods who are said to have been created by the god Enki to establish culture and give civilization to mankind. They served as priests of Enki and as advisors or sages to the earliest kings of Sumer before the Gilgamesh flood. They are credited with giving mankind the Me (moral code), the crafts, and the arts.Apkallu reliefs also appear in Assyrian palaces as guardians against evil spirits, like the modern gargoyle. They are one of the more prominent supernatural creatures that appear in the art of Sargon II (722 – 705 BC). They appear in one of three forms, bird-headed, human-headed or dressed in fish-skin cloaks.
The Fortress of Sargon (Dur-Sharrukin) in modern day Khorsabad, northern Iraq, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. The fortress or palace was built at the confluence of the Tigris and the Greater Zab rivers. The great city was built entirely in the decade preceding 706 BCE. After the unexpected death of Sargon in battle, the capital was shifted 20 km south to Nineveh by his successor Sennacherib.
Sumerian Silver Lyre, from Ur, southern Iraq, c. 2600-2400 BC
This lyre was found in the ‘Great Death-Pit’, one of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The burial in the Great Death-Pit was accompanied by seventy-four bodies - six men and sixty-eight women -laid down in rows on the floor of the pit. Three lyres were piled one on top of another. They were all made from wood which had decayed by the time they were excavated, but two of them, of which this is one, were entirely covered in sheet silver attached by small silver nails. The plaques down the front of the sounding box are made of shell. The silver cow’s head decorating the front has inlaid eyes of shell and lapis lazuli. The edges of the sound box have a narrow border of shell and lapis lazuli inlay.
When found, the lyre lay in the soil. The metal was very brittle and the uprights were squashed flat. First it was photographed, and then covered in wax and waxed cloth to hold it together for lifting. The silver on the top and back edge of the sounding box had been destroyed. Some of the silver preserved the impression of matting on which it must have originally lain. Eleven silver tubes acted as the tuning pegs.
Such instruments were probably important parts of rituals at court and temple. There are representations of lyre players and their instruments on cylinder seals, and on the Standard of Ur being played alongside a possible singer.
