When we try to imagine ancient music, we embark on a journey tens of thousands of years back in time. We have no recordings or musical scores from that time — only indirect evidence found by archaeologists. The first sounds that could be called music were probably very simple: rhythmic clapping, striking stone against stone, or tapping a stick on a hollow log.
The voice was undoubtedly the first and most accessible musical instrument. Ancient people could use it to imitate the sounds of nature — the noise of the wind, the singing of birds, the growling of beasts. Gradually, these sounds gave rise to the first melodies and rhythmic exclamations, which helped in rituals, united the tribe, or simply expressed emotions.
Later, the first man-made tools appeared. Bone flutes are considered to be the oldest of those found. Some of them, made from bird bones or mammoth tusks, are over 40,000 years old. Their discovery proves that the human desire to create melodic sounds and express oneself through music is not just entertainment, but a fundamental part of our nature since the dawn of humanity.
Ancient music was simple but meaningful—people made sounds using whatever tools they had at hand: they struck stones, shook dry pods, and blew into animal bones. This was not for entertainment, but for connection—with nature, with each other, with something supernatural. Music back then helped with rituals, hunting, work, and brought tribes together. We don't know exactly how it sounded, but one thing is clear — music existed long before writing, and even then it was part of life.
Singing is probably the earliest form of music.
Joshua Kumbani, PhD candidate in archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
Simple singing was probably the earliest form of music, followed by organized sounds such as clapping or stomping. Various musical instruments may have appeared later.
For example, the musical bow is considered one of the first musical instruments of the Khoisan tribe in southern Africa. It is claimed that the musical capabilities of the bow were discovered during hunting: after the arrow was released, the bowstring continued to vibrate, producing a musical tone, which led to the use of the bow as a musical instrument.
Some of the earliest instruments of the past do not look or sound like musical instruments. For example, it is believed that a bullroarer, a thin board that was spun on a rope and produced a buzzing sound, was used for musical purposes.
This archaeological monument from the late Stone Age was discovered on the Matis River and is also depicted in rock paintings on the Doring River in Sederberg, South Africa. The use of the “buzzer” could have been varied, but one option was as a musical instrument. It is difficult to recognize this buzzing sound as musical, but “music is in the ears of the listener,” as biologist Jelle Atema once put it.
Music in North Africa emerged a couple of thousand years earlier than in Greece.
Naomi Weiss, Associate Professor of Classics at Harvard University.
Any specialist in ancient civilizations can provide examples of music from their field, although it is always possible to go back to more ancient times. My area of expertise is Ancient Greece, from approximately the 8th to the 4th century BC.
I could talk about the singing of bards in the Iliad and the Odyssey, reflecting traditions that date back to the Bronze Age. Or about the depictions of various instruments on ancient Greek pottery: there are lyres, pipes, trumpets, cymbals, castanets, and drums. Or about the staging of classical Athenian plays such as Sophocles' Antigone or Euripides' Medea. In essence, these were musicals with vocal choirs and dance ensembles and instrumental accompaniment.
Or about music competitions with professional musicians who became famous throughout the ancient Greek world. Or, for example, about the development of music theory in technical treatises dating back to at least the 4th century BC. And also about fragments of Greek musical notation on papyri from Ptolemaic Egypt, a couple of which seem to contain melodies of songs written by Euripides several centuries earlier.
However, none of these examples tell us about the “earliest” music. And if I presented them separately, I would ultimately be following the general trend in the US and Europe of viewing ancient Greek culture as the origin of “Western” civilization. Not only the origin of music, but also of art, literature, philosophy, and democracy itself.
In fact, any Assyriologist will tell you that many early Greek musical traditions and technologies, as well as the means of communication through which they were transmitted, can be traced eastward to ancient Mesopotamia. And, as any Egyptologist will confirm, there is evidence of a developed musical culture in North Africa that appeared there a couple of thousand years earlier than in archaic Greece.
One interesting question to ask is: what did ancient cultures consider to be the earliest form of music? In ancient Greek mythology, music was the prerogative of the Muses, whose parents were Zeus and Mnemosyne. But there were other ideas about the earliest form of music.
Orpheus playing the lyre
As today, songwriters liked to position themselves in a long line of musicians, tracing their lineage not only to mythical figures such as Orpheus, but also to more obvious historical figures such as Terpander of Lesbos, whose songs and lyre playing were particularly famous in Sparta in the 7th century BC. The prototypical form of song is often considered to be lamentation: Herodotus traces this back to Egypt, while one of Pindar's choral songs depicts the birth of various musical forms from the mournful death cry of the Gorgon.
In fact, this is not so different from modern ideas about the evolution of music: ethnomusicologist Steven Feld suggested that musical polyphony arose from the intercultural phenomenon of group moaning during crying.
Perhaps we should follow the example of ancient Greek thinkers in their approach to this question, which goes beyond the scope of human nature. The Peripatetic philosopher Chameleon of Heraclea Pontica, for example, claimed that the ancients discovered music by imitating birds — an idea that survived into the Roman period.
No one knows anything
Samuel Dorf, Adjunct Professor of Musicology, Dayton University.
You probably won't like this, but here's my answer: I don't know, and no one knows. What's more, I don't care, and neither should you.
The earliest physical evidence that humans composed music are fragments of bird bone flutes found deep in caves in the Swabian Alps and made about 40,000 years ago. Using only stone tools, archaeologists painstakingly reconstructed the vulture bone pipes, learned how they were made, and discovered the sounds they were capable of producing. However, reconstructing the instrument tells us nothing about how the music itself sounded.
A bone flute found in a cave tells us as much about the music that was played on it as a plastic fork lying in an alley tells us about the food that the person who held it enjoyed. Mashed potatoes with gravy could be scooped up with it as easily as a maraschino cherry could be picked up from fruit ice cream.
Similarly, a bone pipe, which lacks the most important element of sound production, the mouthpiece or reed, cannot tell us what the music sounded like. However, it can be a challenge for modern musicians to imagine ancient music using such instruments.
German flutist Anna Friederike Potengowski's 2017 album The Edge of Time: Paleolithic Bone Flutes from France & Germany (Spotify) does just that. She uses these ancient instruments not to recreate the sounds of the past, but to present new music to new listeners using the likeness of ancient instruments.
So, the oldest music still lives in us today. These are not complex melodies, but simple and powerful sounds: tapping on wood or stone, rustling leaves, rhythmic clapping. It was rhythm, the beating of the heart, that was its foundation, uniting the tribe during work, rituals, or celebrations.
The voice, of course, was the first and most important instrument. These were not songs as we understand them, but imitations of the sounds of nature — the cries of birds, the howling of the wind, the growling of beasts. This is how people communicated with the world and with each other, investing magical meaning in sounds.
It is a pity that we will never hear that music in its original form. But its spirit remains. It is in children's counting rhymes, in drum solos, in long folk songs. Any music that makes us tap our feet or sing along is a direct descendant of those distant, first sounds created by humans.
