EX. 1-9B Deduction of the diatonic pitch set by fifthsBEGINNINGS, AS FAR AS WE KNOW THEM
This new “beginning” was established in 1974 when a team of Assyriologists and musicologists at the
University of California at Berkeley managed to decode and transcribe the musical notation on a
cuneiform tablet dating from around 1200 BCE that had been unearthed on the site of the ancient Babylonian
city of Ugarit, near Ras-Shamra in modern Syria.^11 The tablet contained a hymn, composed in Hurrian, a
dialect of the Sumerian language, to the goddess Nikkal, the wife of the moon god. The music can be read
as being set for a solo voice accompanied homorhythmically by a harp or lyre, thus testifying to a practice
of polyphonic composition many centuries before the rise of Christian chant. Most remarkable is how
unremarkable this earliest preserved piece of music now seems: it consists of harmonic intervals
recognized as consonant in most Western practice, and is easily notated on the normal Western staff
because it conforms to the same disposition of diatonic whole and half steps used in Western music since
the start of its continuous written tradition (Ex. 1-10). Like the Gregorian chant, the Babylonian melody
conforms to the basic contents of the familiar diatonic pitch set, though not to any of our modern ways of
patterning it.