Music has always been more than just a mild form of entertainment for mankind.

Artists find in music a way to express their emotions, and for music lovers, it is a way to enhance or soothe feelings.

Early forms of music were used by the Vikings as war music to motivate and encourage warriors. The first forms of music used for entertainment date back to the pre-mediaeval period.

Recently, however, it has been discovered that music as a form of entertainment is much older than that, about 3400 years to be exact. This discovery was made using a piece of paper in the Syrian city of Ugarit.

Professor Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, who works as a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, spent fifteen years deciphering the clay tablets that a French archaeologist discovered and excavated in Syria in the early 1950s. The clay tablets were confirmed to be "a complete hymn that is the oldest surviving song in the world".

Professor Kilmer of the University of California worked with her colleagues Richard L. Crocker and Robert Brown to create a record of the song found on the discovered tablet, which had been named "Sounds from Silence".

With the approach taken, Professor Kilmer was able to define a harmony rather than a melody from individual notes. The likelihood of the number of syllables unintentionally matching the note numbers is incredibly high. This extensive research revolutionized the concept of the origins of music and Western culture.

This is how the song sounds in a more modern version:

It is believed that this song was sung with the flute, which is also considered the oldest instrument. What is also very interesting and questions the age of this song is the fact that the origin of the flute dates back to 67,000 years!