ABSTRACT

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a group of French archaeologists in North Africa and Greece were busy searching for ancient lost cities that had been buried over time by the geological forces of nature. In Greece, they had been keenly interested in excavating the ancient city of Delphi since 1861, but bureaucratic stumbling blocks prevented them from doing, so until 1893, at which point they promptly made world headlines by discovering a fascinating marble slab, on which they found clearly inscribed characters denoting both the text and the musical notes of a hymn in praise of the God Apollo, one of the most distinguished gods in the Greek Pantheon, known as the God of light, truth, medicine, music, and the arts, just to name a few of his laurels. Although there may have been some controversy about the exact pitch of the notes carved on this marble slab, there was little doubt about the rhythm of the hymn.