Seikilos epitaph
The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The epitaph has been variously dated, but seems to be either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone (a stele) from the Hellenistic town Tralles near present-day Aydın, Turkey, not far from Ephesus. It is a Hellenistic Ionic song in either the Phrygian octave species or Iastian tonos. While older music with notation exists (for example the Hurrian songs), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.
De rerum natura
Copies of the poem were preserved in a number of medieval libraries, with the earliest extant manuscripts dating from the ninth-century. The oldestand, according to David Butterfield, most famousof these is the Codex Oblongus, often called O. This copy has been dated to the early ninth century and was produced by a Carolingian scriptorium (likely a monastery connected to the court of Charlemagne). O is currently housed at Leiden University. The second of these ninth-century manuscripts is the Codex Quadratus, often called Q. This manuscript was likely copied after O, sometime in the mid-ninth century. Today, Q is also housed at Leiden University. The third and final ninth-century manuscriptwhich comprises the "Schedae Gottorpienses" fragment (commonly called G and located in the Kongelige Bibliotek of Copenhagen) and the "Schedae Vindobonenses" fragments (commonly called V and U and located in the Austrian National Library in Vienna)was christened by Butterfield as S and has been dated to the latter part of the ninth century. Scholars consider manuscripts O, Q, and S to all be descendants of the original archetype, which they dub Ω. However, while O is a direct descendant of the archetype, Q and S are believed to have both been derived from a manuscript (Ψ) that in turn had been derived from a damaged and modified version of the archetype (Ω).