The Mesopotamian Theory of Music and the Ugarit Notation — a Reexamination

At the present writing, research on the Mesopotamian theory of music has already been going on for more than fifteen years. In 1960 Anne Kilmer published two lists of so-called key-numbers or coefficients for various computations — similar to today’s collections of “useful tables.” In one of these, the tablet known by the siglum CBS 10996, a section appeared that had not been known previously from similar mathematical lists; it presented pairs of numbered entities, each apposed to an entity of another class. Benno Landsberger who had suggested the publication of CBS 10996, noted that these paired entities appear singly in the lexical text U.3011 (still unpublished at that time), where they represented a paradigmatic sequence of strings. In the Key-Number Table, therefore, each pairing of strings denotes “something,” but it was not yet clear what these were (for this first presentation and discussion of CBS 10996, see Kilmer 1960: 274–275, 278, 281, 289–300). It should be mentioned, in parenthesis, that shortly before this time (1959) it had been proved that the “Babylonian notation” presented by Curt Sachs in 1923 had not been a notation at all (see here Appendix A, Excursus 1).