📖 Get your signed copy of my album Fable here: www.bethroars.com/shop ☀ Find me on Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/1W0He1MTuQoG0Yt2ccmhyL?si=b5qm82DmSRip8L4abe2-nw 🥁 Become a Patreon Supporter: www.patreon.com/bethroars
@@BethRoars Have you checked out his selection of Theremin music? You’ll find various tracks on his RUclips channel, ranging from ancient to contemporary. ruclips.net/video/7XQN9XDnRm4/видео.htmlfeature=shared
Do me a favor and tell your uncle he's a G! I listen to his interpretations and get filled with such emotion. He's truly gifted. His voice is absolutely surreal.
@@thecheif00 I’ll be happy to pass your message along. He is incredibly talented. Ever since he was a young boy, he’s been a virtuosa of talent. He has the most amazing collection of ancient instruments. Along with his work with the theremin.
Peter Pringle used to be a pretty popular Canadian pop singer back in the 70s and 80s. He just recently regained popularity as a musician due to his interpretations of ancient poems.
One of the comments on that vid really gets me. Basically said how crazy it is that in the time the piece was written that it referred to "ancient days" and just goes to show much of our own history was really lost.
Man o love pete. I have been screaming this stuff for over a decade. My friends (that i have left after this discovery) hate me for it. Each chilling it has to be played when drunk.
The perfect start to Traditional Tuesdays, it really doesn't get more traditional than Gilgamesh in Sumerian. Whenever I see an instrument that I haven't encountered before, especially when it has strings, I desperately want to try playing it. Needless to say, I've already been googling gishgudi to see if there's any way I can get my hands on one. lol
Interesting to hear. Every 1950's child who grew up catholic was familiar with the monastic chants of gregorian music. Every muslim knows the call to prayer. Ancient celtic melodies are revived in concerts across countries. This sumerian solo performance gives you a sense of our elder member singing the connecting sound of humanity. Thanks...should be appreciated.
I remember a comment in original video. That reminds us that the oldest tale ever told starts with "in those distant days". Rome was only 2000 years ago. It already feels old. But when you realise rome and this tale has a larger gap than romans and us. Questions us how old human civilization is?
@@gwyn_ch Yep ..pyramids were somewhere around 2500 to 2700 BC from my faulty memory. The gap difference is like the gap between us and Tamerlane. This is one of the reasons why I hate BC and AC year system. If we just add 10000 years to our current system and consider year 0 is 10000 BC then we can include the most important of human civilizations history in that period. Then this illusion like classical civilizations ( greek and rome) being the beginning of human history we pretend will be gone
The fact that when this was written, society was transitioning from hunter/gatherer society to farming, and them writing it down, sends shivers down my spine...
@@AlexanderMBlade Fair, but it still lingered in their consciousness, and they might have known about people around them that still were hunter/gatherers 👍
@@AlexanderMBlade yeah, but a thing to remember is that the epic of Gilgamesh likely existed long before it was written down, genuinely the lines in this poem come from people who possibly could have been alive during that transition, or at the very least were only a couple generations out from it
You mentioned that maybe some of the audience went to special schools where they learned Sumerian. As it happens a new series has just started on the Digital Hammurabi channel. The first video "Bite-Sized Sumerian 1: How to Translate Ancient Sumerian" has just gone up. Megan and Josh who run the channel are lovely too. Great timing
Beth, you should check out Owain Phyfe, he did historical music in multiple languages. He was a fantastic musician and a great singer. You can find a lot of his work here on RUclips both solo live performances and his studio recordings with his group The New World Renaissance Band.
Isn't this stuff wonderful? I discovered his RUclips presence recently too and I was so thrilled to hear it. In my gap year I took a community college course on Sumerian Archaeology and I suppose it is one of the reasons that I became an archaeologist. I was smitten by the idea of interpreting a culture that had been long-gone and this one in particular is so significant because they are indeed the first one to create a written language. It's so interesting that in this part of the poem, which is essentially the beginning of it, it basically starts in a very familiar form to so much of Indo-European storytelling: "Once upon a time ...". The story of cuneiform is fascinating too as it evolved (as many languages do) out of pictographs that were used for tracking trade goods. But theirs was unique in that the pictographs represented an earlier incarnation of record-keeping in the form of tokens. They figured out that they could send along a sort of receipt with a shipment of goods that was essentially a sealed hollow clay ball that contained little tokens to represent the kind and amount of goods that were sent. When they reached their destination, the recipient would break open the ball and determine if anything had been lost or stolen along the way. The cuneiform version that emerged was practiced by a highly secretive class of scribes. If you were caught with the cuneiform wedge stylus in your possession and you weren't a scribe, you could be put to death for your transgression! Peter's most recent rendition "Enkidu and the Woman Shamkat" is a fairly racy piece of the Gilgamesh poem but quite fun to read about too.
That wedge shaped Sumerian (Cumeiform) writing is really cool. The shape was made with a triangular stylus made from reed that they pressed into clay in different configurations to create characters. It was so ingenious that it was adapted for various other languages as well.
If you want to hear more of this sort of thing, check out the amazing Aussie band, "Dead Can Dance", especially the albums from the 90s, Aion and Toward the Within are outstanding.
Peter's big '77 pop/rock song in Canada was "You Really Got Me Needing You Now." Good song! Another Canadian singer that had a good song around that same time in '78 was Christopher Ward with the song "Once In A Long Time." He was also one of the first DJ's on Much Music which was Canada's version of the USA's MTV.
If this kind of music appeals to you, check out the 'Dead Can Dance' who also interpret a number of medieval and renaissance songs in their work (but not exclusively). You may already know of one member Lisa Gerrard (who solo is known for her work on the Gladiator Soundtrack).
Its pretty crazy how in the song it talks about the ancient days, but this song is one of the most ancient things. Maybe Gobel Teki or Babel and Sumeria being as old.
Soy ignorante para el conocimiento de la música pero lo que hacabo de escuchar se me hace algo único fantástico místico en pocas palabras algo bello tan bello como la coach ❤ bien Beth 👏👏🍀🍀
The oldest song known to man starts with "In those ancient days, before there was bread" that is wild, and Gobekli Tepe was buried on purpose more than 8000 years before Sumer was a thing, we are a species with amnesia.
I was lucky enough to read the Epic of Gilgamesh for my last year of high school. It's about a man who is terribly distraught when his best friend dies, so he goes on a quest to acquire immortality. There's a good summary here: ruclips.net/video/j-yJDbC_a2c/видео.html If you haven't yet watched his stuff with the "harps," do check it out. We know what their instruments looked like because some were preserved. These "harps" don't sound like what you'd expect at all; the people of the time described the sound as "the roaring of bulls." I think the earliest musical notation we have is from classical Greece, thousands of years after this. I'm not even sure we have emphasis-marks for this. Still, it's fun to imagine how the oldest story we know might have sounded. There's a lot we don't know, but much we can infer. For instance, it's almost certain that the point of songs like this was to tell the story, so the music would have supported the words (which makes it the complete opposite of much '80s music, where the words are largely nonsense, just more sounds to merge with the rest of the music). So, you can kinda get a sense of how the rhythms and rising-and-falling of the music should be from the "music" of the words. Though we're not entirely certain about how the words sounded, either.
If you want some classical music to react to, I recommend War March Of The Priests by Felix Mendelssohn. It's not too long, it's not apart of a larger composition (that I know of), and is a very riveting song
A bit of a late comment and I hope someone will catch it. Something that will give you chills and is hard to comprehend is the fact that this epic, ancient to us, something thats actually the oldest recorded story in the complete history of mankind, mentions ancient days, nights and distant years, times, when the heavens were separated from the earth.
Peter sing this with thick english accent -Did akkadians sing this with thick sumerian accent or the other way around - and the there are this the where a formal sumerin sung with pristesses - Did male singer had one for them or where this sung by those women eg not Pringles version
Gilgimesh was the first king of Ur. He was 3/4s god but he was mortal. He was also a tyrant. The gods saw what an AH he was and sent a wild man to be his friend. The description of him makes one think of Big Foot. They were cool until Gil starts to claim royal rights to spend the first night with every new bride in Ur. Enkidu blocked his way and they ended up in a fight that lasted hours. At last both exhausted they called truce and Gilgimesh relented the practice. They fought lions and traveled to the Cedars of Lebanon to fight a demon guard. See Gilgimesh was obsessed with becoming immortal like his mother. This demon guarded the access to the gods. Enkidu was told by the gods to keep him from killing the demon guard but he was feeling rebellious and encouraged Gil to finish him off. The gods were angry and made Enkidu ill and he died. Gil was heartbroken. Nothing mattered. He left his city and traveled north to find his ancestor who had survived the Great Flood and the gods had granted him immortality. He traveled until he came to the shore of a sea. He found someone to take him across and their he met Zuisudra, the Last King of Sumer before the Flood. Zuisudra tells him the tale of how the flood came to be. The gods had decided to destroy mankind but Enki, who had created man, didn't want that to happen so he told Zuisudra to build a boat and put animals and his family and craftsmen inside it. So when the flood came Enki in the form of a fish with a horn (think Narwhale) with a rope from the boat towed them to safety. He releases birds to see if it is safe and finally the doves come back showing the recovery. For all of this Ziusudra is given immortality. Gil begs him to give him the immortality. Zui says if you can stay awake 7 days he will. Gil fails at day 2. Still he begs him. So Zui gives him an herb that if prepared a certain way and drunk with give him immortality. So Gil heads home. He is dusty and tired and decides to bath in the river so takes off his clothes and lays them in a heap with the herb. While he is bathing a snake steals the herb. Now snakes were connected to Enki. Gil finds that it is gone and so are his hopes of being immortal. He returns to the city of Ur and does his best to be a good king. He had the walls of Ur built and gave up on immortality. BTW those walls, though not as tall as they used to be still stand. And due to cuneiform being on clay his story is still known. Perhaps he gained his immortality after all.
You call it a "flow of nature". To me it is deeper, it is the flow of TIME. A time tunnel to the most ancient past, and the links that bind us to ancient ancestors a continuous thread that binds us to Adam and Eve and flows through us to our most far away descendants. That binds all humanity in a net a one.
Welcome to our little kingdom of bronze age sh-tposts. Here we have: • Copper • Iltam Sumra Rashupti Elatim, the ode to goddess Ishtar • Epic of Gilgamesh sung by Peter Pringle • Ea-Nasir (don't buy his copper) • Funny looking statues • Sea People (they're huge party ruiners)
It's great to see the Ancients are getting more love over the last few years, it really is! If you're curious about the myth itself, Abed Azrié conducted a magnificent musical rendition of it in Arabic (subtitled in English) in 2011, at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. And it's got a full video on RUclips! Here's the link unless you want to search for it on your own: ruclips.net/video/9ARRP5i2nw8/видео.htmlsi=9Wyvgf4Sa8boj1bf I think my only regret with these excellent renditions of ancient music which, like Peter Pringle's, aim to resuscitate the original language itself, is the fact I am still not able to really forgo the subtitles and appreciate the language's music fully along with the music of the voice and the instruments as they are. I really enjoy your way of presenting things though; it's really relaxing and prompts reflexion. Rock on!
The Epic of Gilgamesh... features a Demi god, plans of gods and men go awry, enemies becoming firm friends, bromance, fun, adventure and really wild things... but enough about Enkidu...😛 Seriously someone should make a film cycle of it as it will give Disney/Marvel Cinematic Universe a damned good rival.
Uhh...yeah. It would definitely be tricky to be more "traditional" than Sumerian.😁 One of the first known genuine civilisations. What would there have been before? Reed pipes and banging rocks together? Don't get me wrong, that can make some seriously good music.🎶 What puzzles me about such extremely dead languages as Sumerian is, I get how they've managed to translate it, but how on earth do they know how to pronounce it?🤷♂️
To know how an ancient language sounded like you can do all sorts of things. First of all, from poetry you can guess rhymes and such (very helpful for Old Chinese, for example). You can see variations in spelling, which hints at the sound of words. You can compare other languages in the area and of the same family and figure out how they came to sound this way (very good when a relative is still living. That's how we mostly know how Proto-indo-european most probably sounded like). You can check how words have been borrowed from other languages, or how other languages borrowed the writing system. You may also be lucky and find descriptions of the language itself, or writers annoyed at the pronounciation of certain groups of people (the Romans are an example of this). Taking all of this into account one may make an educated guess about the pronounciation of extinct languages, which will never be 100% accurate but it can get close. Unfortunately, Sumerian has the problem of being a language isolate, having very little text written by actual native Sumerian speakers, and most of the text comes from Akkadian scribes. Even then, knowing Akkadian, we can make a decent educated guess
I doubt that this is very close to what the music was back in the days. Seems somehow a little to "sophisticated". But never the less, it's a really nice piece of music and a nice take on the "how could it have been"-question. Love the sound of that instrument and the Arabic scales and melodies.
A little to sophisticated? Based on what? People often do this with ancient civilisations - assuming they knew nothing about anything. When the most proeminent form of entertainment you have is music/poetry one would assume a civilisation would be quite sophisticated in their compositions. It’s not like melody was invented by modern musicians. The only thing modern music did is standardise musical writing and introduce new instruments. You are ignoring the fact that by the time ancient mesopotamia was there (their recorded history that we found) they already had thousands of years to develop their storytelling and singing traditions and styles
@@georgemen No need to get offended. I never said or hinted anything about "they knew nothing about anything". There have been great achievements in ancient history, in arts as well as in science. Maybe "to modern" would have be the better choice instead of "sophisticated". And that's ofc purely my gut feeling. In the end, nobody today knows what it was like back than. So chances are pretty high that what we imagine how it could have been back than, is a fair bit off from what it really was.
@@mrtveye6682 no offense taken and didn't mean to come off like that. I got kinda riled up because lots of people tend to consider ancient people to be complete monkeys or whatever, assuming they could've not made complex compositions, or build pyramids or invent really durable concrete and so on as if they didn't have hundreds and thousands of years to figure that shit out. Yeah, modern might've been the word more "appropriate" for your context, for sure.
@@papalegba6796 i wouldn't call it unsophisticated just because there were african peoples that had a tradition of such styles of music. It's like comparing jazz with technical metal - yeah, tech metal is far more complicated than jazz, but is any one of them two any more sophisticated than the other? And I'm not sure about the time frames of developing those styles. I might be wrong, but i think the ancient Ur and its developments came before any notable african civilisation hotbed? See this is kinda bullshit, cause as far as I know there were some pretty large and complex civilisations in ancient Africa, but because no one really cared about discovering whats there, it got lost to time completely most of what was left. Okay imma stop here cause im starting to fanboy over ancient lost civilisations history
Sumerian, these days, is based on the phonology of the Akkadian language, which gradually replaced it in Mesopotamia. Sumerian is an incomplete language for us and the gaps are filled with best guess replacements. This piece has a very Arabic style.
How do you know what a language that hasn’t been spoken in 5000 years sound like? You can read it / translate it. But there’s absolutely no way to hear how it was spoken.
Through research and lots of inference (aided by language tendencies and what we know), we can make an educated guess of how ancient languages sounded like. These guesses aren't perfect, but they're decent
mostly through tracking how the languages that developed from it sound, but it's a imperfect thing for sure, genuinely it's about as close as we'll ever get
@@DAT240Z72 with ancient sumerian we have a lot of trouble because most sources comes from speakers of Akkadian, which means that we have to keep in mind how Akkadian sounded like to understand correctly Sumerian Sumerian has a fairly contested phonology due to that
📖 Get your signed copy of my album Fable here: www.bethroars.com/shop
☀ Find me on Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/1W0He1MTuQoG0Yt2ccmhyL?si=b5qm82DmSRip8L4abe2-nw
🥁 Become a Patreon Supporter: www.patreon.com/bethroars
Peter Pringle is my uncle! My mom’s brother. When I saw this video notification I was SO excited.
Thats so cool!!
@@BethRoars Have you checked out his selection of Theremin music? You’ll find various tracks on his RUclips channel, ranging from ancient to contemporary.
ruclips.net/video/7XQN9XDnRm4/видео.htmlfeature=shared
Do me a favor and tell your uncle he's a G! I listen to his interpretations and get filled with such emotion. He's truly gifted. His voice is absolutely surreal.
@@thecheif00 I’ll be happy to pass your message along. He is incredibly talented. Ever since he was a young boy, he’s been a virtuosa of talent. He has the most amazing collection of ancient instruments. Along with his work with the theremin.
He's great! I hope he'll deliver many more songs from old times :)
Peter Pringle used to be a pretty popular Canadian pop singer back in the 70s and 80s. He just recently regained popularity as a musician due to his interpretations of ancient poems.
Ahhh a fellow canadian. nice. Thanks for that.
I remember hearing this when I filed a complaint with Ea-Nasir about his sub-par copper.
Nanni?!
lol, that's such a niche joke that I remember from Tumblr
That fucker got you too eh?
UNFOUNDED SLANDER!
One of the comments on that vid really gets me. Basically said how crazy it is that in the time the piece was written that it referred to "ancient days" and just goes to show much of our own history was really lost.
Man o love pete. I have been screaming this stuff for over a decade. My friends (that i have left after this discovery) hate me for it. Each chilling it has to be played when drunk.
The perfect start to Traditional Tuesdays, it really doesn't get more traditional than Gilgamesh in Sumerian. Whenever I see an instrument that I haven't encountered before, especially when it has strings, I desperately want to try playing it. Needless to say, I've already been googling gishgudi to see if there's any way I can get my hands on one. lol
You should read the Epic of Gilgamesh, it's about a 3 hour read. Very amusing story!!! If I ever get a dog i'll name it Enkidu.
or a husband
As long as it is big and hairy.
But it certainly is worth reading.
It would have to be an Anatolian mastiff.
As long as you don't take him to a brothel... 😂😂😂
I have 2 ducks, one called Gilgamesh and the other, Enkidu. They are the best of friends but occasionally fight.
Interesting to hear. Every 1950's child who grew up catholic was familiar with the monastic chants of gregorian music. Every muslim knows the call to prayer. Ancient celtic melodies are revived in concerts across countries. This sumerian solo performance gives you a sense of our elder member singing the connecting sound of humanity. Thanks...should be appreciated.
It sounds like the desert. The wind and theflow of the dunes.
I remember a comment in original video. That reminds us that the oldest tale ever told starts with "in those distant days". Rome was only 2000 years ago. It already feels old. But when you realise rome and this tale has a larger gap than romans and us. Questions us how old human civilization is?
Yeah. Do you know, that age gap between us and Cleopatra is less than gap between Cleopatra and Egypt pyramids building time?
@@gwyn_ch Yep ..pyramids were somewhere around 2500 to 2700 BC from my faulty memory. The gap difference is like the gap between us and Tamerlane. This is one of the reasons why I hate BC and AC year system. If we just add 10000 years to our current system and consider year 0 is 10000 BC then we can include the most important of human civilizations history in that period. Then this illusion like classical civilizations ( greek and rome) being the beginning of human history we pretend will be gone
The fact that when this was written, society was transitioning from hunter/gatherer society to farming, and them writing it down, sends shivers down my spine...
With the sheer size, scale, and scope of the city of Uruk alone, I'd say society had Long since made that transition.
@@AlexanderMBlade Fair, but it still lingered in their consciousness, and they might have known about people around them that still were hunter/gatherers 👍
And the opening still is „in those distant times“. Really puts it into perspective.
@@AlexanderMBlade yeah, but a thing to remember is that the epic of Gilgamesh likely existed long before it was written down, genuinely the lines in this poem come from people who possibly could have been alive during that transition, or at the very least were only a couple generations out from it
I was listening to Diana Ankudinova singing the music from "Dune" immediately before this. A perfect prelude.
Isn't she marvellous? Her rendition of "Rechenka" is just magical!
Very interesting indeed! I read in a comment below that you'll look at more traditional music in the future. Loving that idea! I'll stay tuned!
I'm going to do Traditional Music tuesday :)
This was amazing!! I'm so looking forward to more Traditional Tuesdays. 💚💜
You mentioned that maybe some of the audience went to special schools where they learned Sumerian. As it happens a new series has just started on the Digital Hammurabi channel. The first video "Bite-Sized Sumerian 1: How to Translate Ancient Sumerian" has just gone up. Megan and Josh who run the channel are lovely too.
Great timing
Beth, you should check out Owain Phyfe, he did historical music in multiple languages. He was a fantastic musician and a great singer. You can find a lot of his work here on RUclips both solo live performances and his studio recordings with his group The New World Renaissance Band.
Straight up banger of a tune.
THIS is just another reason I follow you. Brilliant & captivating commentating Beth. Thanks.
Thanks so much!
i love this one too
I love this song. Cool to see you reacting to it
Thanks!
The one he does with the reconstructed/replica harp like instrument sounds amazing.
It's lyre, but yes, looks more like a harp. Drone sound harp.
Isn't this stuff wonderful? I discovered his RUclips presence recently too and I was so thrilled to hear it. In my gap year I took a community college course on Sumerian Archaeology and I suppose it is one of the reasons that I became an archaeologist. I was smitten by the idea of interpreting a culture that had been long-gone and this one in particular is so significant because they are indeed the first one to create a written language. It's so interesting that in this part of the poem, which is essentially the beginning of it, it basically starts in a very familiar form to so much of Indo-European storytelling: "Once upon a time ...". The story of cuneiform is fascinating too as it evolved (as many languages do) out of pictographs that were used for tracking trade goods. But theirs was unique in that the pictographs represented an earlier incarnation of record-keeping in the form of tokens. They figured out that they could send along a sort of receipt with a shipment of goods that was essentially a sealed hollow clay ball that contained little tokens to represent the kind and amount of goods that were sent. When they reached their destination, the recipient would break open the ball and determine if anything had been lost or stolen along the way. The cuneiform version that emerged was practiced by a highly secretive class of scribes. If you were caught with the cuneiform wedge stylus in your possession and you weren't a scribe, you could be put to death for your transgression! Peter's most recent rendition "Enkidu and the Woman Shamkat" is a fairly racy piece of the Gilgamesh poem but quite fun to read about too.
Thanks for this! Fascinating!
The group Dead Can Dance does the same thing, their name means "Dead music is danceable".
Could you react to one of Dead Can Dance's songs please? :)
Yes!! I second that.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks for bringing this to us
Glad you enjoyed it
That wedge shaped Sumerian (Cumeiform) writing is really cool. The shape was made with a triangular stylus made from reed that they pressed into clay in different configurations to create characters. It was so ingenious that it was adapted for various other languages as well.
If you want to hear more of this sort of thing, check out the amazing Aussie band, "Dead Can Dance", especially the albums from the 90s, Aion and Toward the Within are outstanding.
Peter's big '77 pop/rock song in Canada was "You Really Got Me Needing You Now." Good song! Another Canadian singer that had a good song around that same
time in '78 was Christopher Ward with the song "Once In A Long Time." He was also one of the first DJ's on Much Music which was Canada's version of the USA's MTV.
Me: I like old music.
Friend: Oh, so like the 80s or 90s?
Me: Mmmm
80's and 90's BCE😊
This is so well done. I can picture Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Nebuchadnezzar or Nimrod when listening to this. Especially Nimrod that freaky hunter.
you should react to his Lament For GILGAMESH, The Gold Lyre Of Ur, he use an replica of a lyre from ur that was buried 5000 years ago
Do you have any reacting video about Gaelic or Scottish music? Always a pleasure learning from another cultures. ¡¡Pura Vida!!
I have one coming up in a few weeks. I'll be looking at traditional music every tuesday
If this kind of music appeals to you, check out the 'Dead Can Dance' who also interpret a number of medieval and renaissance songs in their work (but not exclusively). You may already know of one member Lisa Gerrard (who solo is known for her work on the Gladiator Soundtrack).
Its pretty crazy how in the song it talks about the ancient days, but this song is one of the most ancient things. Maybe Gobel Teki or Babel and Sumeria being as old.
My fave from Peter Pringle is "ENKIDU And The Woman SHAMKAT" - oPcB7NlI3fo - so beautiful and atmospheric
This is a fantastic interpretation
I love to see you reacting to this video. It is a striking song that i play for napping with my cats 😺
What a wonderful track.
FYI, your links to the original video and his channel both point to the Beatles ;)
Thanks for letting me know!!
Soy ignorante para el conocimiento de la música pero lo que hacabo de escuchar se me hace algo único fantástico místico en pocas palabras algo bello tan bello como la coach ❤ bien Beth 👏👏🍀🍀
I'm waiting for the album. Hopefully a double. That will be a must have the day it comes out.
The oldest song known to man starts with "In those ancient days, before there was bread" that is wild, and Gobekli Tepe was buried on purpose more than 8000 years before Sumer was a thing, we are a species with amnesia.
Peter Pringle is a treasure
Thanks A LOT for this react. I love this and others songs from Peter Pringle! =)
No problem!
I was lucky enough to read the Epic of Gilgamesh for my last year of high school. It's about a man who is terribly distraught when his best friend dies, so he goes on a quest to acquire immortality. There's a good summary here: ruclips.net/video/j-yJDbC_a2c/видео.html
If you haven't yet watched his stuff with the "harps," do check it out. We know what their instruments looked like because some were preserved. These "harps" don't sound like what you'd expect at all; the people of the time described the sound as "the roaring of bulls."
I think the earliest musical notation we have is from classical Greece, thousands of years after this. I'm not even sure we have emphasis-marks for this. Still, it's fun to imagine how the oldest story we know might have sounded.
There's a lot we don't know, but much we can infer. For instance, it's almost certain that the point of songs like this was to tell the story, so the music would have supported the words (which makes it the complete opposite of much '80s music, where the words are largely nonsense, just more sounds to merge with the rest of the music). So, you can kinda get a sense of how the rhythms and rising-and-falling of the music should be from the "music" of the words. Though we're not entirely certain about how the words sounded, either.
Apparently woolly mammoths were still around when this was written.
And bread was a new invention
If you want some classical music to react to, I recommend War March Of The Priests by Felix Mendelssohn. It's not too long, it's not apart of a larger composition (that I know of), and is a very riveting song
A bit of a late comment and I hope someone will catch it.
Something that will give you chills and is hard to comprehend is the fact that this epic, ancient to us, something thats actually the oldest recorded story in the complete history of mankind, mentions ancient days, nights and distant years, times, when the heavens were separated from the earth.
Beth, want to hear the most amazing female voice EVER !? look up "Vanessa Amorosi " singing "Absolutely Everybody "
I remember that song!!
Peter sing this with thick english accent -Did akkadians sing this with thick sumerian accent or the other way around - and the there are this the where a formal sumerin sung with pristesses - Did male singer had one for them or where this sung by those women eg not Pringles version
Munknorr does a lot of ancient European and Native American songs.
btw it's nothing like a Oud at all XDD
but Peter Pringle's work is to be admired... I'd like to know him and to see his workshop!
Do you know Christine and the queens? the song People I ve Been Sad, live is reaaly cool to react
Gilgimesh was the first king of Ur. He was 3/4s god but he was mortal. He was also a tyrant. The gods saw what an AH he was and sent a wild man to be his friend. The description of him makes one think of Big Foot. They were cool until Gil starts to claim royal rights to spend the first night with every new bride in Ur. Enkidu blocked his way and they ended up in a fight that lasted hours. At last both exhausted they called truce and Gilgimesh relented the practice. They fought lions and traveled to the Cedars of Lebanon to fight a demon guard. See Gilgimesh was obsessed with becoming immortal like his mother. This demon guarded the access to the gods. Enkidu was told by the gods to keep him from killing the demon guard but he was feeling rebellious and encouraged Gil to finish him off. The gods were angry and made Enkidu ill and he died. Gil was heartbroken. Nothing mattered. He left his city and traveled north to find his ancestor who had survived the Great Flood and the gods had granted him immortality. He traveled until he came to the shore of a sea. He found someone to take him across and their he met Zuisudra, the Last King of Sumer before the Flood. Zuisudra tells him the tale of how the flood came to be. The gods had decided to destroy mankind but Enki, who had created man, didn't want that to happen so he told Zuisudra to build a boat and put animals and his family and craftsmen inside it. So when the flood came Enki in the form of a fish with a horn (think Narwhale) with a rope from the boat towed them to safety. He releases birds to see if it is safe and finally the doves come back showing the recovery. For all of this Ziusudra is given immortality. Gil begs him to give him the immortality. Zui says if you can stay awake 7 days he will. Gil fails at day 2. Still he begs him. So Zui gives him an herb that if prepared a certain way and drunk with give him immortality. So Gil heads home. He is dusty and tired and decides to bath in the river so takes off his clothes and lays them in a heap with the herb. While he is bathing a snake steals the herb. Now snakes were connected to Enki. Gil finds that it is gone and so are his hopes of being immortal. He returns to the city of Ur and does his best to be a good king. He had the walls of Ur built and gave up on immortality. BTW those walls, though not as tall as they used to be still stand. And due to cuneiform being on clay his story is still known. Perhaps he gained his immortality after all.
Uruk, not Ur. Two distinct cities. And he's listed as the fifth king in the Sumerian king list.
Beautiful.....xx
You call it a "flow of nature". To me it is deeper, it is the flow of TIME. A time tunnel to the most ancient past, and the links that bind us to ancient ancestors a continuous thread that binds us to Adam and Eve and flows through us to our most far away descendants. That binds all humanity in a net a one.
Please react to Peter Pringle GILGAMESH LAMENT FOR ENKIDU
It kinda looks greenscreened to me, but I could be wrong. I love this performance, though, and have listened to it several times.
I thought that too until I researched!
I'm pretty sure it is a green screen. I don't think he actually went to Baghdad to record a four minute song.
Welcome to our little kingdom of bronze age sh-tposts. Here we have:
• Copper
• Iltam Sumra Rashupti Elatim, the ode to goddess Ishtar
• Epic of Gilgamesh sung by Peter Pringle
• Ea-Nasir (don't buy his copper)
• Funny looking statues
• Sea People (they're huge party ruiners)
It's great to see the Ancients are getting more love over the last few years, it really is! If you're curious about the myth itself, Abed Azrié conducted a magnificent musical rendition of it in Arabic (subtitled in English) in 2011, at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. And it's got a full video on RUclips! Here's the link unless you want to search for it on your own: ruclips.net/video/9ARRP5i2nw8/видео.htmlsi=9Wyvgf4Sa8boj1bf
I think my only regret with these excellent renditions of ancient music which, like Peter Pringle's, aim to resuscitate the original language itself, is the fact I am still not able to really forgo the subtitles and appreciate the language's music fully along with the music of the voice and the instruments as they are. I really enjoy your way of presenting things though; it's really relaxing and prompts reflexion. Rock on!
Beth LUCY THOMAS just released a new song for her best version ever of BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS! !!!!! Check it out !!!
The Epic of Gilgamesh... features a Demi god, plans of gods and men go awry, enemies becoming firm friends, bromance, fun, adventure and really wild things... but enough about Enkidu...😛 Seriously someone should make a film cycle of it as it will give Disney/Marvel Cinematic Universe a damned good rival.
When that bonkers youtube algorithm hits juuust right
Please do more reaction videos of Fokofpolisiekar
Uhh...yeah. It would definitely be tricky to be more "traditional" than Sumerian.😁 One of the first known genuine civilisations. What would there have been before? Reed pipes and banging rocks together? Don't get me wrong, that can make some seriously good music.🎶
What puzzles me about such extremely dead languages as Sumerian is, I get how they've managed to translate it, but how on earth do they know how to pronounce it?🤷♂️
I think it is just an idea of what it might sound it :)
@@BethRoars That's fair. But I mean dead languages in general. Like, how did hieroglyphics sound? Or cuneiform?
To know how an ancient language sounded like you can do all sorts of things.
First of all, from poetry you can guess rhymes and such (very helpful for Old Chinese, for example).
You can see variations in spelling, which hints at the sound of words.
You can compare other languages in the area and of the same family and figure out how they came to sound this way (very good when a relative is still living. That's how we mostly know how Proto-indo-european most probably sounded like).
You can check how words have been borrowed from other languages, or how other languages borrowed the writing system.
You may also be lucky and find descriptions of the language itself, or writers annoyed at the pronounciation of certain groups of people (the Romans are an example of this).
Taking all of this into account one may make an educated guess about the pronounciation of extinct languages, which will never be 100% accurate but it can get close.
Unfortunately, Sumerian has the problem of being a language isolate, having very little text written by actual native Sumerian speakers, and most of the text comes from Akkadian scribes. Even then, knowing Akkadian, we can make a decent educated guess
I doubt that this is very close to what the music was back in the days. Seems somehow a little to "sophisticated". But never the less, it's a really nice piece of music and a nice take on the "how could it have been"-question. Love the sound of that instrument and the Arabic scales and melodies.
A little to sophisticated? Based on what? People often do this with ancient civilisations - assuming they knew nothing about anything. When the most proeminent form of entertainment you have is music/poetry one would assume a civilisation would be quite sophisticated in their compositions. It’s not like melody was invented by modern musicians. The only thing modern music did is standardise musical writing and introduce new instruments. You are ignoring the fact that by the time ancient mesopotamia was there (their recorded history that we found) they already had thousands of years to develop their storytelling and singing traditions and styles
@@georgemen No need to get offended. I never said or hinted anything about "they knew nothing about anything". There have been great achievements in ancient history, in arts as well as in science.
Maybe "to modern" would have be the better choice instead of "sophisticated". And that's ofc purely my gut feeling. In the end, nobody today knows what it was like back than. So chances are pretty high that what we imagine how it could have been back than, is a fair bit off from what it really was.
If anything it's unsophisticated imo. Lots of African & Asian music has far more complex polyphony & polyrhythms.
@@mrtveye6682 no offense taken and didn't mean to come off like that. I got kinda riled up because lots of people tend to consider ancient people to be complete monkeys or whatever, assuming they could've not made complex compositions, or build pyramids or invent really durable concrete and so on as if they didn't have hundreds and thousands of years to figure that shit out. Yeah, modern might've been the word more "appropriate" for your context, for sure.
@@papalegba6796 i wouldn't call it unsophisticated just because there were african peoples that had a tradition of such styles of music. It's like comparing jazz with technical metal - yeah, tech metal is far more complicated than jazz, but is any one of them two any more sophisticated than the other? And I'm not sure about the time frames of developing those styles. I might be wrong, but i think the ancient Ur and its developments came before any notable african civilisation hotbed? See this is kinda bullshit, cause as far as I know there were some pretty large and complex civilisations in ancient Africa, but because no one really cared about discovering whats there, it got lost to time completely most of what was left. Okay imma stop here cause im starting to fanboy over ancient lost civilisations history
So far everybody must have heard of Faraya Faraji, I guess... Mentioning, just in case...
I'll bet Justin Johnson could play some good tunes on that 3 string guitar.
The Anunnaki themselves,,their music
A lot of people nowdays know about the epic of gilgamesh from a certain anime series lol
Sumerian, these days, is based on the phonology of the Akkadian language, which gradually replaced it in Mesopotamia. Sumerian is an incomplete language for us and the gaps are filled with best guess replacements. This piece has a very Arabic style.
iltam zumra rashubti ilatim
Learn about Sumeria please
you are gorgeous
you have to know that
you are mesmerizing
find love
brodha v _ song_ aathma Rama please make reacton
U
No u
Noooo U
@@BethRoars I love u 💓
How do you know what a language that hasn’t been spoken in 5000 years sound like?
You can read it / translate it. But there’s absolutely no way to hear how it was spoken.
Through research and lots of inference (aided by language tendencies and what we know), we can make an educated guess of how ancient languages sounded like.
These guesses aren't perfect, but they're decent
mostly through tracking how the languages that developed from it sound, but it's a imperfect thing for sure, genuinely it's about as close as we'll ever get
@@DAT240Z72 with ancient sumerian we have a lot of trouble because most sources comes from speakers of Akkadian, which means that we have to keep in mind how Akkadian sounded like to understand correctly Sumerian
Sumerian has a fairly contested phonology due to that
Peter Pringle sounds like a porn name!.😂
Nevertheless nice song.
I do love the part when he says: "𒀆 𒀋𒀙𒃰 𒄐𒄑"