The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115-2 (Apr. 22, 1971)

"Some nine years ago, the late Benno Landsberger of Chicago's Oriental Institute delivered to the American Philosophical Society a paper dealing with the "Classes and Class Consciousness of Babylonian Society." That study, filled with new insights, was but one of the fruits of his Herculean labors on a corpus of cuneiform tablets and fragments known as the lexical texts. This body of Sumerian and Akkadian material, ranging in time from the third millennium to the very last vestiges of cuneiform writing in the first century B.C., is a rich source for the cuneiformist
because it reflects the surprisingly wide range of the scholarly pursuits of the academicians of ancient Mesopotamia. Because Professor Landsberger had devoted a lifetime to their study, he was an unchallenged caretaker of these difficult texts which provided the ancient, as well as the modern scholar, with sign lists, pronouncing vocabularies, bilingual lexicons topically arranged, grammatical treatises and, in brief, reference works of all kinds. It was his intimate knowledge of these texts that caused the total collapse of a theory concerning ancient Mesopotamian music, a theory that had gained a fair recognition by the 1930's. At that time, a particular cuneiform text containing a list of simple syllables, frequently called "Aameme" after its opening entries, had been interpreted as an ordered collection of notes relating to a scale of three octaves..."