Listen to performances of the world's oldest complete surviving
songS  The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest known complete
composition of music in existence, a Hellenistic Ionic song with
complete notation likely inscribed in the first century AD. And
its notation have allowed modern music scholars to play the song
in the modern day.  Although there are certainly older musical
texts and fragments, the very brief Seikilos epitaph is a
complete song, found engraved on a tombstone near Aidin, Turkey,
along with the inscription, "I am a tombstone, an image.
Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless
remembrance."  The song also has lyrics, translated from the
Ancient Greek:  While you live, shine have no grief at all life
exists only for a short while and time demands its toll.  The
History Blog points to a recent BBC article that details ancient
Greek musical notation. It also notes that David Creese, a
Lecturer in Classics at Newcastle University, constructed a
zither-like instrument called a "ca