The Sumerian Tablet That Encodes 7 Songs — And the One That Activates Human DNA

In the 1970s, a scholar at Berkeley named Anne Kilmer did something no one had done in over 3,000 years. She took a cuneiform tablet, worked out the marks beneath the lyrics, and played the song again. It was a hymn to a fertility goddess written around 1400 BC. That part made headlines. What didn’t make headlines was the rest of the find.

 Six more songs written into the same system, and one of them was never written for human ears. It was written for human cells. That last sentence is going to sound like a stretch. Stay with me, because the path to it is built entirely out of clay tablets, named scholars, and museum catalog numbers, and every step of it is on the record.

 The song Kilmer rebuilt is known today as Hurrian Hymn Number Six. It was pulled out of the ground at Ugarit, on the coast of what is now Syria, in the early 1950s. It came from a group of nearly 40 musical tablets found together in the ruins of a royal palace. Most of those tablets were broken. Hymn Six was the one that survived almost whole, and it carried two things at once, the words of the song and the notes.

 But the song was only half of what came out of that ground. The other half was the code it was written in, and that code did not come from Ugarit. It came from much older cities, from Ur, from Nippur, from the Sumerian and Babylonian world centuries before Hymn Six was ever pressed into clay. Then, in 2006, a broken tablet that had sat unread in a museum drawer for decades was finally published.

 It was labeled CBS 1766, and it carried a drawing nobody had expected to find, a seven-pointed star, each point labeled, each point standing for a string. That star turned out to be the key to all of it. If you find ancient mysteries and the modern science that keeps catching up to them as interesting as I do, take a second and subscribe.

 I cover a story like this every single week. This is the system, and this is the seventh song. Nobody was paying much attention to the music tablets back then. For a hundred years, the scholars who studied cuneiform had spent their time on contracts, king lists, tax records, and law codes. Tablets that dealt with music were treated as a footnote.

 They were hard to read. They were full of special terms nobody could connect to anything real, and they did not tell exciting stories about gods or floods or kings. So, they sat in drawers in Philadelphia and in [music] London and in Baghdad, mostly ignored. That was about to change. To understand what those tablets actually [music] contain, you have to start with the instrument.

 The Sumerians and Babylonians built a stringed instrument they called the sammu. We would call it a lyre. It had nine strings. We know it had nine strings because a tablet labeled UET 7 126 lists every one of them by name. The names are strange and specific. The strings were counted inward from the front and the back of the instrument toward the middle.

 So, each name describes a position. The front string, the next string, the third thin string, the string named for the god of wisdom, and so on, toward the center. Here is the detail that everyone missed at first. There were nine strings, but only seven of them mattered for the music. The eighth and ninth strings were tuned to copy the first and the second [music] one octave higher.

 So, the working instrument was a seven-string system, [music] seven notes, and the Sumerians did not treat those seven notes as a free for all. They organized them with a care so exact that it took modern scholars decades to even recognize, let alone explain. Some of this is not guessing at all. In the 1920s, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley dug up the royal cemetery at Ur and pulled actual lyres out of the graves, instruments more than four and a half thousand years old, their frames decorated with gold, with deep blue

lapis lazuli, with the carved head of a bull. The Sumerians buried their people with music. They thought it mattered enough to send it into the next world. Whatever music was to these people, it was not a small thing. [music] It was not background noise. It was important enough to put in a grave beside a queen.

 The next tablet is the one that started the real arguments. It is held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia labeled CBS 10996. For a long time, CBS 10996 looked like nothing. It is a list of numbers, pairs of numbers, over and over with a word written in front of each pair. To a translator who did not know what they were looking at, it read like a supply list or a math drill or an accountant’s worksheet.

 It is none of those things. Someone finally noticed two things at once. The numbers were never higher than seven and they were always grouped in pairs. One and five, two and six, three and seven. The moment you stop reading them as a list and start reading them as pairs of strings on a seven-string instrument, the tablet comes alive.

 CBS 10996 is a list of intervals. It names 14 of them. Each interval is the sound made when two certain strings are plucked together and each one of those 14 sounds has its own name. Think about that for a second. Nearly 3,000 years ago, someone sat down and wrote out in careful order every meaningful two-note pairing their instrument could make and gave each one a label the way we would name a chord today.

 That is not a backward people fumbling toward music. That is music theory written down, filed away in records. But a list of intervals is still not a song. >> [music] >> It is closer to a dictionary. To get from a dictionary to actual music, you need one more tablet. And that tablet is where the seven songs actually live. Ur, around 1800 BC.

 The tablet is labeled UET 774. It came out of the ground at Ur, dug up by Woolley’s teams, and it dates to the Old Babylonian period. It was published by the scholar Oliver Gurney in 1968, and when the field finally worked out what it was describing, it changed the way everyone read every other music tablet that came before it.

 UET 774 is a set of instructions. It tells a musician how to tune the instrument and then how to retune it one string at a time to move from one scale into the next. And it does not describe one scale. It describes seven. Each of the seven carried a name. Ishartum, Embubum, Nid Qablim, Qablitum, Kitmum, Pedum, Nishturim.

 Seven tunings, seven different arrangements of the same seven notes. [music] And the instructions form a cycle. If you follow them all the way through, retuning string by string, you pass through all seven scales and arrive back exactly where you started. A closed loop. Seven doors, and the seventh one opens onto the first.

 [music] That is the system. Seven songs is not a figure of speech here. It is a count. The Sumerians built seven complete musical worlds out of one instrument, and they wrote down the exact steps for moving between them. And here is where it stops being a dry, dull task. In Mesopotamia, music was not entertainment.

 It was not background. It was a function. It did a job. The clearest proof of that is a group of songs called the Balag [music] and the Ershemma. These were morning songs, performed in temples by a certain kind of priest called the Gala. The Gala did not sing in everyday Sumerian. He sang in a separate form of the language called Emesal that was used almost nowhere else in the written record.

 And these morning songs were not performed because they were beautiful. They were performed because they were believed to work. A Balag was sung when a temple was damaged or rebuilt to handle the anger of the god whose house had been disturbed. And Ershemma had an even more exact purpose.

 The text describe it in plain language as a song for calming the heart of a god, not praising the god, calming it, settling it, bringing a restless god’s mind back down to calm. Strip away the religion for a moment and look at what they are actually claiming. They are claiming that organized sound, arranged with care, produces an exact, repeatable effect on a living being.

That is not really a religious idea. That is closer to a theory. So, when you line the seven scales of UET 7 74 up against everything else the tablets tell us, a shape appears. These were not seven random tunings a musician picked between for a change. Each one had a job. Some belong to mourning. The deep heavy tunings of the city mourning songs, the songs sung over Ur and over Uruk when those cities fell, songs that survive in the record under titles like the lament for Ur.

 Some belong to praise. The bright tunings carried through festival and parade. And some belong to the calming songs, the Ershemma, the music built to reach into a mind and change its state. The Sumerians had, in a way, seven musical tools, and they knew which tool was for which job. And these were not nameless folk tunes drifting along by word of mouth.

 Several of the broken Hurrian tablets from Ugarit still carry the names of the people who composed them, scratched into the clay next to the notes. Named composers, credited authors. Music treated as a work with a known writer, the way we would credit a piece of writing. The tablets even include instructions for the performer, notes on how the piece was meant to be played.

 A second report came out of the same records years later, backing it up, and the picture only sharpened. This was a recorded trade with a theory, a way to write it down, a list of intervals, and a standard set of steps for tuning. The Sumerians and the people who took over their system were not guessing at music. They were running it.

 Six of those seven scales survive only as instructions. >> [music] >> We have the tuning. We have the names. We do not have a complete whole song that we can prove was built on them. The seventh is different. The seventh we can play. Before we get to it, I want to be honest about what is solid here and what is not because this is the point where the story takes its turn and I would rather you trust the ground under your feet than feel like you are being led somewhere.

 Everything up to this point is what most scholars agree on. The tablets are real. The catalog numbers are real. The seven scales are accepted by the people who study this subject for a living. The rebuilt song is real. None of that is in doubt and you can check every piece of it. What comes next is not settled. It is a question the evidence raises and it is a question that serious people have started asking, but it stays a question, not a settled answer.

 If ancient history that keeps crashing into modern science is the kind of thing you came here for, this is a good moment to subscribe because the next part is the reason this video exists. All right, here is where the story stops being about archaeology and starts being about biology. The seventh song is Hurrian Hymn number six, the one Anne Kilmer rebuilt at Berkeley in the 1970s.

 The one she and her fellow scholar Richard Crocker put onto a recording called Sounds from Silence so that for the first time in roughly 3,400 years, people could actually hear it. And the hymn is not a morning song. It is not a war song. It is not a song written to praise a king. It is a hymn to Nikkal and Nikkal was a goddess of orchards and of fertility, the wife of the moon god.

 The surviving lines of the hymn are a prayer and the prayer is very exact. It asks that the barren be made to bear. It asks that women who have had no children be given children. It asks that the childless be made fertile. The the song, the one that survived whole, the only one of the seven we can actually play. It is a fertility ceremony set to music.

 Most people who hear that recording online have no idea about any of this. They hear a soft, slow, strange melody on a lyre, and they are told it is the oldest song in the world. What they are almost never told is what the song is for. Now, hold the purpose of that hymn next to something the Sumerians believed without any doubt at all.

 They believed the right song built the right way could [music] reach into a god and change its inner state. They built an entire kind of music, the arshema, around exactly that claim, calming the heart, changing a state through sound. So, here is the question the seventh song forces into the open. If these people thought ordered sound could act on a mind, and they wrote a fertility hymn using the most carefully built tuning system in the ancient world, what, exactly, did they think that hymn was acting on? This is where modern work becomes very hard to ignore.

In the 1960s, a Swiss researcher named Hans Jenny gave a name to a field of study, cymatics. Cymatics is the study of what sound does to physical matter. Jenny was building on much older work. Back in the 1700s, the physicist Ernst Chladni had shown that if you draw a bow across a metal plate covered in fine sand, the sand does not scatter at random. It moves.

 It gathers along the lines where the plate sits still, and it forms clean, regular patterns. Change the note, and the pattern changes with it. Sound, it turns out, pulls loose matter into shapes. That is not magic. That is physics, and it has been shown in labs for more than 200 years. The modern field that grew out of that work is called bioacoustics, and it studies how sound and vibration affect living tissue. We already rely on it.

Ultrasound builds a clear image of an unborn child out of nothing but reflected sound. Focused sound waves break apart kidney stones deep inside the body without a single cut in the skin. Surgeons now use tightly focused ultrasound to destroy small tumors without ever opening the body, aiming sound the way you would aim a blade.

Sound, directed correctly, reaches into the human body and does real work there. That is not a theory. That is ordinary medicine used every day in hospitals around the world. The open question, the one that is truly unsettled, is whether sound reaches deeper than tissue. Whether it reaches the cell.

 Every cell in your body is a physical structure, and physical structures have resonance. They have certain frequencies at which they vibrate most strongly. A growing line of research treats the living cell not as a quiet bag of chemicals, but as something that hums, something that responds to physical vibration, something that shifts how it behaves when the environment around it changes.

>> [music] >> And this next part matters most of all. Your DNA is not a fixed program that runs the same way no matter what happens around it. The field of epigenetics has shown, over the last 20 years, that genes are switched on and off by signals from the environment. Stress can do it. So can your diet.

 So can a change in temperature. Your genes are not a stone tablet with one fixed message. They behave much more like an instrument, [music] and the environment is always playing them. So, set the pieces down in a row. Sound shapes matter. Sound does work you can measure inside the human body. Cells respond to vibration, and genes respond to signals from the environment.

 Not one of those four statements is far-fetched. Each one, on its own, is accepted, tested science. The leap, the part that is not proven, is the single line that connects them. The idea that an exact, designed series of frequencies could reach a cell, match its resonance, and nudge the way its DNA works.

 The idea that a song could act as a signal from the environment, exact enough to change what your genes actually do. There is a group of independent researchers working at the quiet edge of bioacoustics who think that line is real. They point out something real about the Sumerian system. The Sumerians did not tune their instruments to the modern standard.

 They built their scales out of pure math ratios, simple fractions, the same kind of ratios that show up in the natural resonance of physical objects. And they argue that a tuning system built from those ratios is far more likely to land on the true resonant frequencies of living tissue than any modern, less exact [music] tuning ever could.

 That is a real argument. It is also, as of right now, an unproven one. No lab has put the rebuilt seventh song in front of human cells and published a result that settles the question in either direction. Anyone who tells you the case is closed is getting well ahead of the evidence. But look hard at what the Sumerians actually left behind, and the question simply refuses to go away.

 They left a fertility goddess. They left a hymn written for her, asking in plain words that the childless be made to bear. They left the most exact tuning system in the entire ancient world, seven scales locked into a closed math loop. They left a clearly stated belief that the right sound, built the right way, could change the inner state of a living being.

 And they left every piece of it written into clay in a system careful enough that 4,000 years later we could read it back and play it out loud. If the Sumerians had simply enjoyed music, none of this would carry any weight. People have always enjoyed music. But that is not what these tablets describe. The tablets describe music as a technology, a tool with a clear job, something built to produce an exact effect.

 And the seventh song, the only one of the seven that survived whole, the one we can still play today, was the tool they built for the creation of life. Maybe that is just chance. Maybe the seventh song survived simply because it was popular, because scribes copied it often, because clay is fragile and luck is blind and one tablet beat the odds while the rest cracked.

 That is the careful answer. It might well be the correct one or maybe the seventh song survived because the people who carried it forward understood in their own language and on their own terms that it was the most important one of the seven. That of all the tools, this was the tool that could not be allowed to be lost.

 Go back to where this story started. A scholar at Berkeley in the 1970s sitting alone with a clay tablet and a problem that nobody had solved in 3,000 years. She worked out the notes. She found the right instrument and she played a fertility hymn to a goddess of orchards out loud in a room for the first time since the Bronze Age.

 She believed she was bringing back a song. She may have been bringing back the last working piece of a system that the Sumerians built on purpose, improved over centuries, and trusted enough to carry into the grave. >> [music] >> We can read six of the seven scales. We can only hear the seventh and we still do not fully understand what it was built to do.

 The tablets are all still there. CBS 10,996 in Philadelphia. CBS 1,766 with its seven-pointed star. UET 774. The instructions for all seven doors. They have been read, recorded, and translated. The one thing nobody has finished doing is taking the seventh song seriously enough to put it to a real test. Until someone does, the oldest complete piece of music on Earth stays exactly what it has been for 34 centuries.

 A prayer for life written in a code we cracked, played on an instrument we rebuilt, waiting on an answer we have not yet earned. If forgotten history that keeps turning out to be ahead of us is your kind of thing, you need to see what is coming next week. The video on screen breaks down another Sumerian tablet that recorded something modern science only proved in the last decade.

 [music] Click it.