Seikilos Epitaph The First Musical Composition Ancient Greece 100 AC
Saturday 01 August 2020 at 4:29 pm
The Seikilos epitaph is carved in marble stele dated 100 AC from Ancient Greece
Did you know that the Seikilos epitaph is carved in marble stele, or a column, with poetry and music that is the oldest surviving complete music composition?
Seikilos Epitaph The First Musical Composition Ancient Greece 100 AC at the Museum of Denmark
The melody with lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone from the Hellenistic town Tralles, not far from Ephesus in Turkey. The Epitaph was discovered in 1883 by Sir W. M. Ramsay, since it was lost to be rediscovered in 1922, Its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand as a pedestal for flowerpots. In 1966, it was acquired by the Museum of Denmark.
It is a Hellenistic song written in the Ionic dialect, that for me these days rings a bell as Eastern Greece or Alexander the Great or Macedonia or the famous Ancient Egyptian Rossetta Stone (with its 3 languages inscription) and many Ancient Greek scripts found in ancient Greek colonies in Egypt, Malta, Sicily.
In 1943, the Nobel wining novelist Herman Hesse published his novel The Glass Bead Game, Das Glasperlenspiel, set in a monastic society that develops minds by studying and playing the glass bead game. One would master philosophy and literature, and then focus on mathematics and music to be able to play the Game. Both mathematics and music are with us since the time of Pythagoras. History is like playing the Hesse's glass bead game with Pythagoras...
Mathematics is described as the science of pattern and music as the art of pattern, both using meditation within the process of contemplation developing own language of symbols.
The Ancient Greek Herodotus Ἡρόδοτος 484 BC – 425 BC (H-R-DATOS) as his name suggests was a King's historian, the one who collects data for the King or the Priest. It is hard to believe that a family would have given such a name to a child. (“Statistcians” you shall be, so we shall name you H-R-DaToS).
Fragment from the Herodotus Histories Papyrus 200 AC
Aristotle refers to a version of The Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium," and some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about southern Italy from his personal experience there. Of course, researching life and work of a person who has lived 2,500 years ago, everything about him or his work, but his writings, is a guess work used often in history to manipulate our minds to like or dislike a Ruler or a Nation, or a Political Party.
Metamorphoses. Transformation. A journey of a soul passing through Gaia, but also an epic poem in fifteen books written 2,000 years ago, by the Roman poet Ovid, completed in 8 AC inspired by the Ancient Greek Theogony Θεογονία “Birth of the Gods” attributed to Hesiod 700 BC, and the Derveni 500 BC.
The Oldest Greek Papyrus 500 BC Derveni Papyrus
The poet's writings are based on already fully established Ancient Greek manuscript tradition. Re-writing myths, the creation story, Ovid begins by describing how the elements emerge out of chaos, and how mankind degenerates from the Gold Age to the Silver Age to the Age of Iron. This is followed by an attempt by the giants (Titans) to seize the heavens, at which the God Jove sends a great flood which destroys all living things except one couple, Deucalion and Pyrrha.
The Metamorphoses, as a collection of myths is influenced by an earlier Greek work called the Theogony Θεογονία “Birth of the Gods” attributed to Hesiod 700 BC. It is a long narrative poem compiling Ancient Greek myths. Hesiod describes how the gods were created, their struggles with each other, and the nature of their divine rule. In the Theogony, the origin (arche / aRČe) is Chaos, a primordial condition, a gaping void (abyss), with the beginnings and the ends of the earth, sky, sea, gods, mankind. Symbolically associated with water, it is the source, origin, or root of things that exist. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the cave like space under the earth), and Eros, who becomes the creator of the world.
Learning from symbols, and sounds of the first ever Research Paper by Archimedis Syracusani
Hellenistic mathematicians in the 500 BC, prefered using a system of numbers based on the alphabet. To indicate that a letter is a number, they would place a horizontal line above the symbol.
Archimedes_Palimpsest 250 BC an orthodox Christina prayer text 13th century revealed works by Archimedes thought to have been lost
The School of Athens or aθήνα and Numbers with Archimedes of Syracuse
What is now known as "Attic numerals" were in use 700 BC, in the region of Attica, the city of Athens down to the Aegean Sea.
Archimedes of Syracuse or Αρχιμήδης 287 – 212 BC, was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer, and he is considered one of the greatest mathematician of all time, He was the first to calculate the accurate approximation of pi, defining the spiral bearing his name, he hypotheses that the Earth revolves around the Sun on the circumference of a circle. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier, and his original work was “lost” for thousands of years.
The work, also known in Latin as Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli, is eight pages long in translation, is the Humanity's first matematical research paper.
Archimedes presents his callculation done for the King, stating that the large numbers were given to him to execute this exciting task, to discover the amount to sand that can fit into the Universe. The Sand Reckoner (Greek: Ψαμμίτης, Psammites) is the name of this work.
Estimating the grains of Sand in Universe Archimade
Can you just imagine the complexity of this task, can you comprehend the advances in science, and the thought form, if the Syracusan king Gelo II, pays the Philosopher Archimedis Syracusani to execute this research and leave it written for the future scientists.
In order to do this, he had to estimate the size of the universe!
Sleeping Lady from Hypogeum Malta Temples 3,500 BC
…death is an important interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greats them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.
Jung (1959) about Archetype, the myth of Dying
Answering the question why the focus on death, Jung replies: “Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question … is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.”
Older we get, more profound is our relationship with our psyche, or soul. Jung translates the Greek - pistis, the New Testament “faith” as “trust”, emphasising the importance of developing the trust in the psyche, trusting the wisdom of the psyche’s timings, using the dream work to develop a relationship with the Self. Tending dreams, and acting on their guidance, respecting intuitions and synchronicities, one gains confidence to face the death.
