Bibliographic record
Abstract
The least conjectural components of the earliest known system of musical notation (ca. 1850-500 BCE) are 14 names for pairs of strings. Each of these names designates a pair of numbered strings on a Mesopotamian harp or lyre. These numbered string-pairs provide a basis for analyzing the earliest musical scores that survive, 35 musical notations of Hurrian provenance ca. 1350 BCE. Of these 35 scores, only one, identified as ‘h.6’ by Assyriologists, appears to be intact from beginning to end, the remaining 34 being fragmentary because of damage during the past three and a half millennia. As well, like two of the other 34 scores, h.6 refers in its colophon to a numbered string-pair, namely, nitkibli, that plausibly designates a particular tuning of the 7 numbered strings. With a view to characterizing the repertoire as a whole and determining whether the three nitkibli pieces differ significantly from the other 32, the pieces’ numbered strings, string-pairs, and immediately successive string-pairs are analyzed in terms of relationships of sameness, adjacency and analogy. These relationships are defined within a framework of first-order logic. Analyzed statistically, the 35 pieces reveal considerable uniformity of idiom. Because it survives in a continuously notated form, h.6 can be analyzed in even greater detail and reveals a structure of great coherence that is quite consistent with tendencies among all 35 pieces.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.046 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".