666 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
The Oxford History of Music (Buck, 1929) begins with a chapter 
on Greek music, followed by a second chapter, “Music of the Hebrews.” 
In these and the following chapters, it is acknowledged that all Greek 
music had its origins in Asia Minor and that the characteristic and 
celebrated musical instruments of the Greeks and Hebrews are known 
from ages long preceding the times of those peoples. But these facts 
are told only in the footnotes. There we read about the Sumerian 
kithara represented on a bas relief from Tello, which is now in the 
Salle Sarzec of the Louvre; “as pictured, this kithara evinces a high 
standard of craftmanship and theoretical knowledge.” 
The same source, speaking of the remote origin of the lute, mentions 
the smallest member of the family, the tamboura, which figures on a 
bas relief coeval with the above- 
mentioned, coming also from the 
palace of Gudea, Sumerian ruler 
of ancient Lagash. We may add 
that Donald E. McCown exca- 
vated at Nippur in 1952 a clay 
plaque with the figure of a man 
holding a lute. 
The number and diversity of 
surviving musical instruments and 
the cuneiform documents men- 
tioning different types of songs 
are witnesses to a fairly high mu- 
sical culture in Sumerian cities be- june 42-—Mountain goats; engraved 
tween the third and the second shell plaque. 
millenniums B.C. One wonders 
if scholarship will ever proceed to the point of reconstructing and 
reviving the music of the Sumerians? A courageous effort was made 
by F. W. Galpin (1937). 
CONCLUSION 
From architecture to music, all arts and crafts of today owe a cer- 
tain debt to the ancient masters of Sumer. The present brief sketch 
of Sumerian achievements in the field of technology is far from ex- 
hausting the field, nor was this even attempted. Yet we cannot con- 
clude this review without mentioning two important branches of 
human activity, from which the technical know-how is inseparable: 
the sciences and the art of healing. 
Tt has been stated and far too often repeated, more or less explicitly, 
that the human communities preceding the classic period of antiquity 
lived in the darkness of despicable black magic and superstition. 
This is not a fair picture; there has certainly been an evolution in 
