FIG. 1-10 Attic Greek amphora (jar), ca.490 B.C.E., showing someone singing to a lyre. Greek music theory was mainly
confined to prescribing tunings for the lyre, in three genera, or types: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. These words have
survived in modern musical terminology, although not with precisely the same meanings.
Ex. 1-11b contains the earliest surviving artifact of actual Christian service music, a fragment from the
close of a Greek hymn to the Holy Trinity, notated on a papyrus strip during the fourth century CE and
discovered in 1918. The hymn is probably a translated extract from the liturgy of the Syriac Christian
church. Although we cannot be certain (since it is our only example), it seems to be built up out of a
diatonic formula-family. It is the earliest surviving representative, by six or seven centuries, of the Greek-
texted music of the Orthodox (that is, official) church of the Eastern Roman Empire, known as the
Byzantine Empire after Byzantium (or Constantinople), its capital until 1453.
EX. 1-11A Second stanza of the First Delphic Hymn, transcribed by Egert Pöhlmann and Martin L. WestUnlike the Western Roman church, which came to cultivate the traditional prosepoetry of the Psalter