Rediscovered Stone, Recovered Sound

Both hymns were unknown to the modern world until French archaeologists excavating at Delphi in 1893 uncovered the inscribed blocks of the Athenian Treasury on which they are carved, bringing to light not just texts but actual ancient Greek musical notation, small symbols placed above the lyrics indicating pitch, that had not been available to scholars in any comparable completeness before that excavation. Their recovery transformed the study of ancient Greek music from something reconstructed mostly through theoretical treatises describing scales and intervals into a field with actual notated compositions to examine, however fragmentary, and the two Delphic hymns remain among the handful of ancient Greek pieces substantial enough to attempt a modern performance reconstruction from, a project musicologists have undertaken with reasonable, though not universal, confidence in the results.

The notation system uses letters and modified letter forms from the Greek alphabet placed above the sung syllables to indicate specific pitches within the ancient Greek modal system, a method distinct from and much older than the staff notation of later Western music, and reconstructing performance from it requires resolving genuine scholarly disagreements about instrumental accompaniment, rhythm and the precise tuning of the ancient Greek modes the hymns employ, none of which the inscription specifies as completely as a modern score would. The dating to 128 or 127 BCE is fixed unusually precisely for an ancient composition because the inscriptions include the datable list of names of the Athenian delegation that performed them at Delphi's Pythian festival that year, a rare case of ancient musical evidence anchored to an exact recorded event rather than inferred from style alone.