作者：Leon Crickmore;
摘要：One of the most significant recent developments in musicology has been the transcription and interpretation of certain musical cuneiform texts dating from the second millennium BC. It has been established that Old Babylonian music was diatonic and probably based on seven heptachords, corresponding to the first seven tones of the ancient Greek octave species. However, there remains a problem: there is some ambiguity in the texts about whether the scales should be rising or falling, and their nomenclature changing according to which direction is chosen. This article suggests a possible resolution of the difficulty. On the assumption that Old Babylonian theoreticians might have quantified their scales, the article arithmetizes the tuning procedures of the two.....