JERUSALEM, ISRAEL—Scholars have taken a fresh look at a 5,000-year-old seal impression unearthed in western Galilee in the 1970s, and think that it may be the oldest depiction of music being played ever found in Israel. The image shows two standing women and one sitting woman, who is playing a musical instrument, thought to be a lyre. The performance could be a scene from the sacred marriage ritual between a Mesopotamian king and a goddess. “We identified it as a lyre by searching through artworks and observing the remains of actual lyres found in Mesopotamia,” Yitzhak Paz of the Israel Antiquities Authority told Haaretz. Other known seal impressions from the third millennium B.C. depict dancing and feasting as part of this sacred marriage rite. To read more about Bronze Age seal impressions, go to "Lasting Impressions."
