Ann Coulter: Most women who say they were raped are just ‘girls trying to get attention’ 
 
 What really lasts in this world? What dies, what can be revived? Are humans basically the same now as in ancient times? I was left pondering these questions after listening to singer and composer Stef Conner’s album The Flood. It’s probably the first ever to be sung in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian, and it’s hauntingly beautiful.… 

 The Flood: new music from ancient words 
 
 The Lyre Ensemble – Stef Conner (singer/composer), Andy Lowings (harpist/creator of the Gold Lyre of Ur Project) and Mark Harmer (producer/harpist) – create ethereal contemporary vocal music from the world’s oldest poetry, accompanied by reconstructed 4,500-year-old instruments. 
 
 Their debut album ‘The Flood’ (available now) is the first full-length CD of new music in Sumerian and Babylonian, for voice and reconstructed ancient Mesopotamian instruments! You can order a copy from the Lyre Ensemble website or download it on iTunes or Amazon. 
 
 Stef, Mark and Andy formed the Lyre Ensemble because they shared a passion for the rich and fascinating corpus of Mesopotamian literature, as well as a desire to make music using reconstructions of beautiful ancient instruments; they were driven by the belief that new music is a powerful tool to forge empathetic connections between people in the modern world and voices from the deep past. When they came together to make the album, none of the group had a precise plan or firm idea of what to expect from the collaboration – they just met in a little medieval church near Andy’s house, with a collection of ancient lyres, a box of random resonant metal objects, some Mesopotamian poems and a stack of recording equipment, and started to improvise! By the time the album was recorded, everyone involved was surprised and somewhat awed by what they had collectively created. The incredible Mesopotamian poems and beautiful Gold Lyre of Ur have inspired some of the strangest, rawest and most gripping, otherworldly songs you will ever hear, as well as some fun, amusing and often downright bizarre little excursions into the ancient Mesopotamian world, which reveal that in many ways, people in the remotest of ancient civilisations were actually a lot like us! 
 
 You can see a recent performance of the title track from the album – a sung version of the flood narrative from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh – below. Enjoy! 
 
 The Flood is available to buy online from www.lyre-ensemble.com. 
 
 Image and videos ⓒ Mark Harmer 

 Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images 
 
 This article originally appeared in New Scientist. 
 
 Stef Conner is a composer, performer, and musicologist with interests straddling classical and folk genres. She is working with a group that recreated an ancient lyre and aims to reverse-engineer music of the second millennium B.C. 
 
 Are there any traces of Babylonian music, which hasn't been heard for more than 3,000 years? 
 
 We have the text of lots of poems from ancient Mesopotamia, and it seems likely that some were originally songs of a sort. We have the words, but the music was either not written down or is lost. I thought it would be exciting if we could listen to these poems as they were meant to be heard. The reason I think we can do this is that the language of the poems—their stresses, intonation, and rhythm—provides clues about musical style. 
 
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 When did you develop your interest in the links between language and music? 
 
 My Ph.D. was in composition, with a focus on the ways in which language can be used as musical material. At that time I also played piano with a folk band called The Unthanks. It gave me new insights into how music interacts with language. 
 
 Isn't it a bit of a leap from modern folk music to the music of ancient Mesopotamia? 
 
 I got in touch with a group interested in lyres and harps, as I am very interested in Anglo-Saxon music. Through them I met Andy Lowings, who organized the Gold Lyre of Ur Project, which built a replica of a 4,550-year-old Mesopotamian gold lyre. He asked me to compose music for the lyre, and last year we recorded the result—an album of contemporary music, sung in Babylonian, called The Flood, out this December. 
 
 What about more historically accurate music? 
 
 It would be nearly impossible to work with Babylonian poetry and replica instruments and not become preoccupied by the question of what Mesopotamian music really sounded like. 
 
 So how would you go about answering that? 
 
 I propose to look for features that recur frequently in living music linked to Mesopotamia. The point is to look for the most consistent features in a widely dispersed collection of music. The most commonly occurring will be those most likely to have been features of Mesopotamian music, either because they have been preserved through musical lineages branching out from Mesopotamia, or because external influences have caused them to be invented over and over.
– A singer with folk roots and a guy who "plays a mean lyre" have recorded haunting songs that sound something like ancient Babylonian music, Raw Story reports. No one knows what Babylonians listened to—the tunes are long-lost—but singer/composer Stef Conner says she relied on the natural stresses and rhythms in Babylonian poetry. "We have the text of lots of poems from ancient Mesopotamia, and it seems likely that some were originally songs of a sort," she tells Slate. "I thought it would be exciting if we could listen to these poems as they were meant to be heard." So she teamed up with Andy Lowings, who had already organized a project to construct a replica golden lyre that Mesopotamians would have played 4,550 years ago. Lowings "asked me to compose music for the lyre, and last year we recorded the result—an album of contemporary music, sung in Babylonian, called The Flood," Conner says. "You can't perfectly reconstruct a Mesopotamian song in this way. But I think if you could go back 3,000 years and play it to Babylonians, they would say: 'Oh, that sounds a bit like our music.'" So what are the songs about? They cover everything from insults to come-ons to eroticism, romance, lullabies, and misery. One tells the story of a woman who "married a malicious husband" and "bore a malicious son," then found that "an unhappy heart was assigned to me." A preview is available on Conner's website, and iTunes will release it next month. (See how the material of ancient parchment holds clues to the past.)