Seikilos Epitaph - Song of Seikilos - Σείκιλος (Reconstructed Ancient Greek)

The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition in the world, and the oldest surviving example of Ancient Greek musical notation for that matter. The melody is inscribed on top of the lyrics on a tombstone stela, that was found near Aidinion, current day Turkey (in the vicinity of Ephesus), where a woman was using the block of marble as support for her pigeon water hole. It was subsequently lost for a few decades after the 1921-1922 Greek Asia Minor genocide by the Turks, and having survived that catastrophe virtually unscathed, it then resurfaced in Smurna where Turkish railway Director Edward Purser’s wife had the bottom sawed off so that it would stand nicer for her garden’s flowertops. This obliterated one line of text. The Dutch Consul saw it by chance and brought it via Constantinople to the Hague and then to Copenhagen for safe keeping during the war, where it has been “kept safe“ ever since, like all other antiquities in museums around t