We only have the vaguest notions of what Mesopotamian music sounded like. A few scholars have tried to resurrect its sounds, drawing on evidence from surviving texts and instruments, but their efforts are mostly exercises in imaginative reconstruction. Yet I am not surprised that these restorations possess a mesmerizing, trance-like quality. Mesopotamia, during the long centuries before the fall of Babylon in 539 BC and its subsequent dominance by foreign powers, provides us with perhaps the clearest example of a flourishing ancient musical culture still under the sway of magical, ritualistic influences. We sometimes refer to the people who presided over these ancient rituals as priests or priestesses, but in many ways they are closer in spirit to the shamans who rely on music as a key component of what Mircea Eliade has called “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”1
Even though we lack detailed information on the sound of the songs, we have learned an enormous amount about the ancient musical culture of the region since Hormuzd Rassam’s 1853 discovery of the clay tablet containing the Epic of Gilgamesh—often described as a poetic work, but almost certainly sung to its earliest audiences. And we continue to learn more in the new millennium. Twenty new lines of Gilgamesh were found in 2011 on a clay tablet purchased by an Iraq museum from an unnamed individual, probably a smuggler, for $800. Just as fascinating as the texts are the musical instruments and related objects uncovered in archaeological digs, especially those found by Sir Leonard Woolley during his excavations at the Royal Cemetery of Ur, in present-day Iraq, between 1922 and 1934. We now have an abundance of evidence to draw on in describing this culture, yet these texts and objects reveal musical practices so different from our own that it is often difficult for experts to bring them into any coherent relation with current-day notions about the role of songs in a society.
There are many strange things to consider here, but let’s start with the animals. In fact, you can hardly ignore them, because they are simply everywhere. Musical instruments were built to look like animals. In other instances, images of animals were added as decorations onto the surfaces of instruments. Surviving artworks also include depictions of animals playing musical instruments. Sumerian literary texts reveal a similar animal obsession—these creatures are the single largest source of poetic comparisons. Waves engulfing a boat are described as a devouring wolf. A bull is often employed to convey well-being and power. The roar of the bull is used to describe the speech of a ruler, the pronouncement of an oracle, or the sound of a busy temple. It’s almost as if a kind of collective zoological mania prevailed among these people.
Scholars have offered a hodgepodge of theories and speculative notions in explaining the role of these animal musicians in ancient art. Confronted by representations of four-footed creatures playing instruments, esteemed musicologist Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin surmised the existence of “a kind of profane music”—perhaps a type of wild jazz for the Mesopotamian demimonde. “Their inspiration seems less religious than facetious,” she notes, and even detects the possibility of satire. But Duchesne-Guillemin doesn’t rule out the opposite theory—namely, that these ancient images might be purely realistic, and the apparent animal is just a hunter in disguise, trying to capture prey. In any event, she insists that such images should not be viewed as representative of any deeply held belief system. The pioneering antiquarian musicologist Francis Galpin, in contrast, was willing to accept a religious significance, at least to the impressive bull lyres found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, but only in a narrow sense. These instruments, he claimed, celebrate the moon deity, known as Nanna or Sin, who was patron of the city of Ur and sometimes depicted as a bull with crescent horns.2
Yet, as we know from our consideration of the earliest hunting communities, the relationship of animals to music-making is much older than the city of Ur—indeed, the Lascaux cave paintings predate the Sumerian city-state by more than ten thousand years. And anyone schooled in shamanism and the belief systems of traditional societies will find it impossible to accept the interpretation of these images as comic or satirical. The animal was the source of power in these communities, offering both functional support as a source of food and raw materials and magical assistance as the totemic protector and provider. In Mesopotamia, the northern area offered rich grazing lands in a region where so many other areas were barren, and cattle must have been central to economic and cultic practices. In the old burial areas, people are often found interred with tubular cylinder seals bearing images of animals, especially horned cattle, and these almost certainly were expected to provide benefits in the afterlife to the deceased. It’s even possible that the courtyards facing the oldest temples of Sumer initially served as cattle enclosures, and only later evolved into the temene, or holy groves. In this context, we should hardly be surprised to find music associated with cattle—in fact, that is the very sign that its performance was not merely profane, but inextricably linked to the highest powers.
If early archaeologists were perplexed by the animals, they were even more dismayed by the sex toys. “The mounds of Nippur were fairly strewn with phallic emblems,” complained John P. Peters, an archaeologist and Episcopalian minister who conducted excavations in central Iraq from 1888 to 1895. His colleague Hermann Hilprecht put together a huge collection, “commencing with the crudest representation of the male member” all the way to “conventionalized spikes and cones.” But this esteemed Assyriologist soon learned that government officials did not share his enthusiasm for old phalluses. One functionary refused to include them on a list of antiquities, and the whole assortment was eventually lost or destroyed by the very officials responsible for preserving them. Peters was perhaps secretly pleased by their disappearance, but would nonetheless find a moralizing lesson in the sex obsession of the ancients, calling attention to the similarity between Sumerian myth and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden—in both cases, he explained, “it is the woman who with the serpent entices the man to the sexual act which shall make him the producer of life, like to the gods.”3
At the very moment that the Nippur excavations were taking place, Sir James George Frazer was providing an essential conceptual framework for understanding these scandalous artifacts in his pathbreaking study The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, but eventually expanded into a mammoth twelve-volume version released between 1906 and 1915. The modernist poet Ezra Pound has given us a pithy one-sentence summary of this huge body of research. Our accepted conceptions of morality, Pound explained, “go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops.” Then, Pound added: “That ought to simplify a good deal of argument.”4
Frazer may have simplified matters, but he also created a scandal in his detailed assessment of the fertility cults of the ancient world and in his confident assertions of a link between fornication and the prosperity of the greater community. But perhaps even more shocking to Victorian readers was the implicit connection between the mythology of these rituals, with their celebration of a dying and resurrecting god responsible for the fertility of the land, and the Christian doctrine of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was hard to escape the conclusion that this latter religious tenet, accepted by believers as gospel truth, could be reinterpreted as a comparatively recent variant of a much older pagan myth found in every major ancient civilization.
Frazer’s critics have often complained he was disrespectful, but have never agreed on exactly what he had insulted. For many, his unforgivable sin was reducing Christianity to the level of an anthropological ritual; for others, he went too far in imposing elaborate interpretations on pre-Christian rituals. “Frazer is much more savage than most of his ‘savages,’” asserted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “His explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves.” In other instances, Frazer has been castigated for blaming violent and lustful human behavior on the seasonal changes, and thus committing a calumny against the natural world. One often discovers in these critiques the same kind of shame or embarrassment that has shaped so many reinterpretations of songs and lyrics over the centuries. But even as other theories of ritual have tried to go beyond Frazer, they invariably return to the constituent elements of sexuality and violence—the same driving forces that underpin so much of the flux and change in human music-making. More recent thinkers, such as René Girard, Walter Burkert, and Charles Taylor, among others, have cast light on the crucial role of ancient ritual in channeling drives for lust and vengeance that would wreak havoc if not given some sanctioned outlet. But as these rituals evolved into something resembling what we now recognize as religion, the same animating drives became embarrassments, or actual sins, offenses demanding punishment and eradication. This whole process bears many similarities with the repurposing and reinterpretation of music described in these pages. Yet this should hardly surprise us: music and ritual have always shared a closely intertwined history.5
For our purposes, we are concerned with the musical implications of this body of research, essential not only for our understanding of the songs of ancient Mesopotamian culture, but also for our grasp of the traditions of other societies. Perhaps our own, too. Indeed, the fertility songs and rituals of five thousand years ago bear an uncanny resemblance to the content of many pop-music YouTube videos. Researcher Sierra Helm has gone so far as to juxtapose photos of contemporary female superstars with ancient depictions of Sumerian goddesses to point out similarities between “the devotional practices directed towards the goddess Inanna in ancient Mesopotamia and towards celebrities in present-day America.” Sometimes the connection with ritualistic worship is made explicit, as when starry-eyed fans refer to a sexy starlet as a goddess, or when a pop singer decides to go by the name Madonna and juxtapose her semi-naked body with religious iconography. But even when the language and settings are purely secular, the cult of the modern celebrity evokes ancient practices in many particulars.6
In ancient Mesopotamia, as Assyriologist Gwendolyn Leick points out, “nude male figures or phallic symbols are comparatively rarer than naked females and depictions of the vulva.” I have called this same phenomenon in modern popular music the Bob Fosse meme, acknowledging the influence of this celebrated choreographer in designing dance routines juxtaposing a well-dressed man (usually in formal attire or a uniform) and a mostly naked woman. This combination has served as a recurring fantasy in music videos and films, from “Whatever Lola Wants” to “Blurred Lines” and beyond. The same recipe predominated—in even more explicit form—in ancient Mesopotamian imagery. The woman’s sexual persona is the center of attraction. The man’s sexual prowess is acknowledged, but typically in the context of its fertilizing properties. In discussing core myths filled with explicit couplings, Leick adds that “the male protagonists, typically young, vigorous gods, achieve impregnation with each orgasm.” Here this predictable male potency is less celebrated than female fertility, and the music reflects this as much as the visual art.7
But in other ways, this ancient music is very different from our own sexualized hit songs. Eroticism in these old hymns is, again and again, linked with vegetation and the natural world. In a description of the sexual union of King Dumuzi with Inanna, the goddess of love and fertility, her naked body is repeatedly compared to a field that needs plowing. She refers to her “uncultivated land.… My high field, which is well-watered. My own nakedness, a well-watered, a rising mound.” Then asks:
I, the maiden—who will plow it?
My nakedness, the wet and well-watered ground—
I, the young lady—who will station there an ox?
To which her lover responds:
Young lady, may the king plow it for you.
May Dumuzi, the king, plow it for you.
As the song reaches its culminating point, Inanna exclaims: “The lord of all things, fill my holy churn!”8
Very little gets censored on the radio today, but I suspect a song titled “Plow My Vulva” might get a shock jock fired from the station even in our current ‘anything goes’ society. But the ancients didn’t worry about warning labels for their hymns. Sexual union was a cause for celebration, not shame. Put simply, what Brian Wilson did for surfing in his tunes, Mesopotamians did for genitalia. Even so, these songs weren’t designed to titillate, or at least that wasn’t their primary function. They had a higher purpose: the prosperity of the community was at stake, perhaps even the legitimacy of the king’s rule. This was especially evident in the sacred marriage ritual, which scholars often call by its Greek name, hieros gamos. In the Sumerian version, the king was expected to have sex with a goddess on a special recurring occasion, probably held in conjunction with celebrations for the New Year. The role of the goddess was played by the High Priestess of Inanna, and the songs associated with the ritual sung from her perspective.
Scholars debate whether the couple really had sex or merely enacted a symbolic union, perhaps something akin to the simulated bed scenes in a Hollywood movie. I suspect that the coupling was real—the importance of this coming together was so great, and the surviving details of the ritual so specific, that it’s hard to imagine its climax as being anything short of… well, actual climax. But the mechanics of their union is less important, for our purposes, than the songs that accompanied it. And those leave very little to the imagination. “At the king’s lap stood the rising cedar,” a religious hymn proclaims. “Plow my vulva, man of my heart,” Inanna demands.9
Darwin never knew about such songs. He came up with his thesis about the sexual origins of music long before Frazer’s research or Woolley’s excavations. But Darwin clearly would have considered these rituals, and their songs, as confirmation of his theory that music originated as an evolutionary mechanism to ensure propagation. Of course, he believed that human songs led to the birth of more babies, not an increase in cattle or crops, but his general idea of music as a survival tool is compatible with these subsequent findings. In fact, the accumulated evidence of the 150 years since he wrote The Descent of Man makes it hard to comprehend the evolution of song without constant reference to magic, sex, fertility, and ritual.
This is the precise context in which the singer-songwriter first appears on the scene. Enheduanna, the oldest songwriter known to us by name whose works have survived, was a high priestess of the Sumerian city-state of Ur in the third millennium BC. She composed more than forty hymns, but these aren’t your typical songs of worship, and this may explain why the “Mother of Song” doesn’t appear in school textbooks. In fact, if you showed her saucy lyrics to modern-day ministers, they would be horrified by the dirty songs of Enheduanna. Perhaps many ancient Sumerians also objected to this music—at least if we judge by the defaced alabaster disk that contains her image, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1927. Woolley believed that the damage to the disk was deliberate, although perhaps not due to the priestess’s explicit lyrics. There were many reasons to dislike, or simply fear, Enheduanna. First and foremost, she was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, a man famous for both shedding blood and committing sacrilege, who may have served as the inspiration for the biblical Nimrod, mastermind behind the Tower of Babel. But we must also consider whether this deliberately damaged disk isn’t simply one more example of the recurring pattern, found in so many other cultures, of powerful men attempting to erase, marginalize, or reinterpret the songs of women—as documented by the disappearance of most of Sappho’s oeuvre or the masculinized exegeses of the Shijing, the Song of Songs, and other traditional expressions of female desire.
Already by the time of Homer, a different purpose of song can be detected, one that will grow in importance over the next several hundred years. When the singer Demodocus is summoned to entertain at a banquet in the eighth book of the Odyssey, he is expected to sing “the famous deeds of fighting heroes.” After the Pythagorean revolution, this theme becomes the primary purpose of the most respectable songs. The lyric becomes less about erotic longings and personal emotions, and more about celebrating the strong and the powerful. Sappho may be the most famous singer of ancient lyric poetry today, but the Greeks esteemed her successor Pindar far more highly, prizing his works because they celebrated the glories of his age and the worthiest of men. Few of us nowadays may care to hear a song about the wealthy tyrant Hieron, best known for introducing the secret police into Western life, or the boxer Diagoras of Rhodes (whom Pindar insists is descended from the god Zeus), famous for pummeling other men in the Olympic competitions. But this was how you made the Billboard charts, or whatever their ancient Greek equivalent might be, starting in the fifth century BC and continuing for many long centuries afterward.10
Why should we care about this today? Well, for a start, we can hardly understand our own music if we don’t comprehend the persisting opposition between these two very different functions of song. Let me label, for the sake of simplicity, the tradition that emphasizes fertility, ecstasy, and magic as the feminine tradition in music. The contrasting approach, celebrating discipline, social order, powerful men, and group conformity, we’ll call the masculine alternative. Take, for example, the historical role of drumming, and see how it can serve either of these functions. Historian Johan Huizinga once made the brilliant observation that the age of knights and chivalry ended when drums were introduced into military campaigns. The drum instilled uniformity and solidarity into the troops, but at the expense of the individual personalities that loom so large in war narratives of an earlier day. Huizinga’s chronology can be questioned—images from the seventeenth and eighteenth Egyptian dynasties depict Nubian military drummers long before the medieval era—but he is correct to grasp the power of percussion as a tool of social control. Yet drums have also been a key source in instigating ecstatic trance states and breaking down demands for social conformity. The latter kind of drumming took place in Swing Era ballrooms, and at Woodstock, and was originally associated with women, as made clear in The Bacchae by Euripides and other ancient texts and images. There’s extensive scientific literature to back up both of these functions of drumming—our brains respond to external rhythm both as a source of discipline and as a gateway to transcendence. These sharply defined alternatives are, in other words, guideposts not just to music history, but also to current practice. Show me how you play a snare drum, and I can tell you which lineage you claim.11
Let’s return to ancient society. Unless we understand the magnitude of this rupture in music history, we can hardly make sense of the various commentaries on songs in the surviving literature. Plato, for example, seems to express contradictory attitudes toward music, at some points expressing apprehension and calling for prohibitions, at others insisting on the importance of song and dance in education. Yet a closer scrutiny shows that he praises music that upholds civic virtues and leads to orderly behavior, but wants to eliminate songs that inflame undesirable emotions and incite improper actions. Plato is especially hostile to musical lamentations. This may seem like a small matter, but it is very revealing. The lament for the dying god was a key part of fertility rituals, and even when sexuality was removed from the equation, these sorts of songs were considered one of the specialties of women, who relied on them to channel feelings that might otherwise remain repressed. Repeatedly, for almost fifteen hundred years after the time of Plato, the lament would get attacked as a dangerous song genre, and restrictions on it were imposed by powerful men. Condemnation of the lament was a recurring theme, for example, in medieval Christian pronouncements on ‘sinful’ music. Until the rise of the troubadours at the dawn of the twelfth century, dwelling excessively on overwhelming personal emotions, particularly in song, was considered a sign of moral weakness; even more to the point, it was deemed womanish. The rhetorician Quintilian summed up this contrast at the dawn of the Roman Empire, when he attacked “the lascivious melodies of our effeminate stage”—music that he claimed was “unfit even for the use of a modest girl”—and looked back with nostalgia on a better age, when music was employed “to sing praises of brave men.” In a similar vein, Cato and Cicero expressed their admiration for these ideologically charged carmina conuiualia of early Rome. This term is sometimes translated as “ancestral songs” and refers to music performed by dinner guests in praise of heroes from the past.12
Here again, we need to consider funeral rituals to grasp the full impact of this shift in priorities. The ancient and medieval authorities are surprisingly consistent in their distaste for musical lamentations and tried to prevent women from singing them for more than a thousand years. The enemies of this music had little success in eradicating songs of grief and mourning, at least judging by the persistence with which they needed to repeat their attacks. But the ancients had recourse to a substitute that they elevated to a position of preeminence and strived to preserve for posterity: the laudatory song praising the deeds of the dead. Bards were enlisted to perform these uplifting alternatives to weepy-eyed lamentations. The occasion of death now became what we might call a “teachable moment”—a chance to instill ‘manly’ virtues, by means of suitable music, in the hearts and minds of the onlookers.
We have flip-flopped these priorities today. We now expect songs to express personal feelings, especially the most intimate kind. Songs of boasting and praise aren’t unknown to modern listeners—they flourish in hip-hop (which reflects a surprising number of similarities with the ancient songs of praise by Pindar and others), as well as in calypso and a few other genres—but, except for this handful of exceptions, such exercises in braggadocious bardic behavior thrive only on the periphery of popular music. And any song that celebrates a politician or a military campaign makes us uneasy, entering a sphere that, at worst, resembles propaganda, or at best ought to be the domain of historians and social scientists. Judging by hit recordings and YouTube views, we have returned to the much older paradigm that sees music as an expression of sexuality, especially female sexuality, and deeply felt emotions. In a strange way, we have returned to the priorities of our Mesopotamian predecessors.