A Forgotten Melody

She is not a musician. But no one has come closer to unearthing civilization's lost chord than Anne D. Kilmer, who is a professor of Assyriology at the University of California at Berkeley. After five years' study of clay tablets discovered in an excavation of the city of Ugarit (now Ras Shamra, Syria), which flourished more than 3,000 years ago, Kilmer deciphered the thin cuneiform script as the words and musical symbols of an ancient song. Older by 1,400 years than the 400 B.C. papyrus that contains music for Euripides' play Orestes, Kilmer's finding is the earliest specimen of notated music. Her discovery puts music's birthplace in the Middle East, debunking the prevailing theory that Western music originated in Greece. "These findings have absolutely revolutionized thinking about the age and history of Western music," she says.

Last week, with the help of Musicologist Richard L. Crocker, who sang and played the song, and Physics Professor Robert R. Brown who built a replica of an eleven-string Sumerian lyre on which Crocker accompanied himself, Kilmer's discovery was unveiled at the university's Wheeler Auditorium. It was a short monophonous melody with a delicate Oriental redolence, much like a lullaby or love song. "The song appears to tell of love among the divinities, but we have such a limited vocabulary in Hur-rian, so far about the only words we know are father, love and beloved of the heart," Kilmer admitted.

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