The Seikilos Epitaph
Lost for seventeen centuries, caught up in a war, and used as a pedestal for a plant pot, this is the world’s oldest surviving song.
late ?50-100
Lost for seventeen centuries, caught up in a war, and used as a pedestal for a plant pot, this is the world’s oldest surviving song.
late ?50-100
The Seikilos Epitaph is the oldest surviving song to be completely written down, text and music. It has made it through almost two-thousand years by the skin of its teeth.
‘WHAT is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’*
At about the same time that St James wrote this, a man named Seikilos, from a village near Ephesus, lost his wife. She must have been fondly remembered, for in her tomb he hid a cylinder of stone engraved with a little song, complete with music. It runs something like this:
While thou livest, radiant be,
Grieve not, nay not for a moment;
Our life appeareth for but a little time,
And Time demands his
toll.
After it was discovered in 1883, the stone survived being sawn down to make a pedestal for a flower-pot, but it was leading a charmed life, only narrowly escaping the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. Fortunately, the world’s oldest song ended up in the safest of places, a museum in Copenhagen, and the haunting melody of Seikilos’s last goodbye is still being heard today.
See James 4:4
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