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LIVING AND DOCUMENTED CULTURE · 01

Music in Sumerian cities

Lyres, harps, drums and song appear in tombs, images and texts.

Museum documentation · free public access, no account required.

DECLARED VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION · AI-GENERATED IMAGE · TRACEKEEPERS

Generated reconstruction · Declared visual hypothesis

Declared visual reconstruction, created for museographic contextualisation; not a photograph of the original nor does it constitute documentary evidence.

Image of Music in the Sumerian cities
DECLARED VISUAL RECONSTRUCTION · AI-GENERATED IMAGE · TRACEKEEPERS

Generated reconstruction · Declared visual hypothesis

Declared visual reconstruction, created for museographic contextualisation; not a photograph of the original nor does it constitute documentary evidence.

History and context

The Queen's Lyre preserves ancient parts around a reconstructed modern case: we can study what the instrument was like, but not recover the melody that was played with it.

Evidence and interpretation

DAI-based synthesis · Uruk; British Museum · Royal Cemetery of Ur; Penn Museum · Goddesses, Mothers, Rulers. The comparison serves to ask questions, not to fill in the gaps in the record with certainty.

Catalogue facts

Civilisation or trajectory
Southern Mesopotamia: Uruk and Sumerian cities
Scope
Music and sound
Main area
Uruk and the alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates, in present-day southern Iraq.

A closer look

About 1 min to read · 1 section. Further reading and sources · free access. Editorial review recorded: .

What a tiny musician shows

In the upper corner of the banquet panel of the Banner of Ur appears a person playing a bull-headed lyre and another identified by the British Museum as a singer. The comparison with excavated instruments allows us to relate the represented silhouette and the material form of the lyres. It also places the sound in a scene of collective consumption: the musicians are next to seated diners. This placement is concrete visual data about the social prestige of a performance.

Location and territory

Physical world map with routes of human evolutionPresent-day world coastline from Natural Earth in an equirectangular projection. The overlaid markers let you explore each milestone.Map base: Natural Earth 1:110m · public domain · present-day reference coastline

REGIONAL AREA

Southern Mesopotamia and cities of the floodplainSouthern Mesopotamia and cities of the alluvial plain. The footprint marks the indicative center of the area, not a border or an exact point.

Sources and references

Consult the sources of this cultural synthesis

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