Seikilos epitaph

Seikilos epitaph
Seikilos stele with poetry and musical notation
Type	Stele
Material	Marble
Writing	Koine Greek
Created	c. 1st or 2nd century AD, Tralles, Asia Minor
Discovered	1883
Discovered by	W. M. Ramsay
Present location	National Museum of Denmark

The Seikilos epitaph is an Ancient Greek inscription that preserves the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation.^[1][2][3] Commonly dated between the 1st and 2nd century AD, the inscription was found engraved on a pillar (stele) from the ancient Hellenistic town of Tralles (present-day Turkey) in 1883. The stele includes two poems; an elegiac distich and a song with vocal notation signs above the words.^[4][5] A Hellenistic Ionic song, it is either in the Phrygian octave species or Ionian (Iastian) tonos. The melody of the song is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in ancient Greek musical notation. While older music with notation exists (for example the Hurrian songs), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.^[6]

Based on its structure and language, the artifact is generally understood to have been an epitaph (a tombstone inscription) created by a man named Seikilos and possibly dedicated to a woman named Euterpe. An alternative view, put forward by Armand D'Angour, holds that the inscription does not mark a tomb, but was instead a monument erected by Seikilos himself to commemorate his musical and poetic skill.^[7]