Before notation, humans carved flutes from bird bone and cave-bear femurs. This is the trail from the first instruments to a hymn inscribed on a clay tablet around 1400 BC, a melody you can play today.
A pierced femur from a Slovenian cave, perhaps 60,000 years old. If Neanderthals bored those holes, music is far older than our species' art.
Skeptics argue the Divje Babe holes were punched by carnivore teeth, not toolmakers. The debate over the world's oldest instrument is still unsettled.
Twenty-five crane-bone flutes from Jiahu, China, can still sound a six-note scale, making them the oldest playable instruments ever found.
Clay tablets from Ugarit, around 1400 BC, carry cuneiform instructions for lyre tuning and melody: the oldest substantially complete written music on Earth.
A modern reconstruction of the 3,400-year-old hymn to the goddess Nikkal. Different scholars read the damaged notation differently, so no two versions match.
Anne Kilmer spent 15 years turning cuneiform signs into notes. Why the tablet still sparks argument about rhythm, harmony and how it truly sounded.
Oxford's Armand D'Angour reconstructs the actual sound of ancient Greek song from surviving notation and the pitches of the aulos.
Reported October 23, 2026: excavators at Homer's Troy found a bone flute fragment, the first musical instrument ever recovered from the legendary city.