it is not known what the earliest human music was like. some architecture and paintings are thousands of years old, but old music could not survive until people learned to write it down. the only way we can guess about early music is by looking at very old paintings that show people playing musical instruments, or by finding instruments in archaeological digs (digging underground to find old things). the earliest piece of music that was ever written down and that has not been lost was discovered on a tablet written in hurrian, a language spoken in and around northern mesopotamia (where iraq is today), from about 1500 bc.