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Notes 59.4 (2003) 877-879



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Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources. By Joachim Braun. Translated by Douglas W. Stott. (The Bible in Its World.) Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2002. [xxxvi, 368 p. ISBN 0-8028-4477-4. $30.] Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index.

The western bias toward notated music has meant the invisibility or marginalization of many rich music traditions for which notational systems have not survived or which were created and transmitted through performance, without recourse to a musical score. Lacking written documentation or recordings, such traditions, especially those from cultures that are no longer extant, must be recovered through painstaking interdisciplinary methods. Archaeologically retrieved remains and depictions of musical instruments as well as relevant extramusical information provide the raw data from which the musical culture of a traditional society can be reconstructed.

Joachim Braun has taken on such a task, with remarkable success, for a part of the ancient world that is of particular interest to western readers, namely, the Holy Land region of the Middle East. Indeed, the very title of the book—Music in Ancient Israel/ Palestine—uses the double nomenclature for the geographical area which is its focus so as to draw special attention to the music of the ancient Israelites and, indirectly, to the Bible as a source of information about musical instrumentation and practices in the biblical world. The scope of this book, however, is much wider, chronologically and even geographically, than the biblical allusion of the title indicates. It begins with the end of the Stone Age (twelfth millennium to 3200 B.C.E.), continues through the Bronze Age (3200-1200 B.C.E.) and Iron Age (1200-587 B.C.E.) as well as the Babylonian-Persianperiod(587-333B.C.E.), and concludes with an overview of the Hellenistic-Roman period (fourth century B.C.E.-fourth century C.E.) that also includes some consideration of the ensuing Byzantine period. Although the book focuses on the land of the Bible, it rightly construes that region widely, examining materials from southern Syria to the north, the Negev and Sinai to the south, and the ancient trans-Jordanian kingdoms to the east as well as relevant parallels from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The use of the term "music" in the book's title is somewhat misleading, given the lack of written documentation of the music itself. Rather, this work is in fact an ambitious organological project. It involves the classification of the musical instruments of a succession of ancient Levantine peoples. It also considers these instruments from a cultural perspective; that is, it seeks to recover the social, political, and/or religious contexts for the acoustic events implied by the existence of the various instrumental types available, whether used alone or in combination, as they developed over the millennia of the pre-biblical, biblical, and early post-biblical past.

The introductory chapter will perhaps be of greatest interest to musicologists, but they may also be disappointed in the lack of a concluding chapter that would have provided a welcome summary of the major insights of this far-ranging analysis. Braun describes the parameters of the book and the sources he uses—archaeological and iconographical as well as ethnographic. Drawing upon the work of archaeologist Helga Weippert (Palästina in vorhellenistische Zeit [Munich: C. H. Beck'sche, 1988]), he characterizes the diversity yet continuity [End Page 877] of instrumental forms as "heterogeneity within homogeneity" and "non-simultaneity within simultaneity." These concepts, which inform much of what emerges in subsequent chapters, depict a highly complex chronological and regional cultural continuum of musical instruments and their depictions. In general, this rich variation across time and space is a defining feature of the culture of ancient Palestine, situated as it is at the crossroads of three continents in an area of highly varied topography and settlement types. Another important concern in this chapter is that of terminology and taxonomy. The author draws upon the major written source for Levantine antiquity—the Bible—for terminology, while recognizing the risks in...

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