2,800-Year-Old Bone Flute Unearthed in Troy May Have Been Played During Homer’s Time

Image by Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, via Twit­ter

The pro­lif­ic Hans Zim­mer scored Christo­pher Nolan’s films over the dozen years from Bat­man Begins through Dunkirk. From 2020’s Tenet onward, Nolan has employed the younger Swedish com­pos­er Lud­wig Görans­son. Just what dif­fer­ence this has made in the result­ing pic­tures is a mat­ter best left to the scruti­ny of the most obses­sive fans, but any view­er can hear how much Zim­mer and Görans­son dif­fer styl­is­ti­cal­ly. This past sum­mer, the siren song includ­ed on the sound­track of The Odyssey fea­tured one of the lat­ter’s par­tic­u­lar­ly notable choic­es: the use of an aulos, a dou­ble-reed­ed wind instru­ment much played back in ancient Greece.

Though Görans­son did­n’t have a gen­uine­ly ancient aulos on hand, of course, the sound pro­duced by the repli­ca proved evoca­tive enough. But just this year, as it hap­pens, a bone flute actu­al­ly dat­ing from the peri­od in which Homer wrote The Odyssey was unearthed from the archae­o­log­i­cal site of ancient Troy in mod­ern-day north­west­ern Turkey.

As Smithsonian.com’s Meilan Sol­ly writes, the past 160 years of dig­ging there have pro­duced “a pair of gold diadems, more than 100 two-han­dled wine gob­lets, and arrow­heads and weapons dat­ed to the Late Bronze Age, among oth­er arti­facts.” This 2,800-year-old flute isn’t just the first musi­cal instru­ment dis­cov­ered at the site, but also fur­ther evi­dence that Troy was­n’t the ghost town it was once assumed to be in the eighth cen­tu­ry BC.

As always when deal­ing with ancient arti­facts — and espe­cial­ly ones, as these pic­tures reveal, in a less-than-whole state — we should be care­ful with our terms. “Call­ing the object a flute is the exca­va­tors’ choice of word, and the type remains open,” says Ancient Ori­gins. While this new dis­cov­ery could poten­tial­ly be a real Greek aulos, “with­out hole counts or a pub­lished draw­ing, match­ing the Troy find to that design is pre­ma­ture.” Archae­ol­o­gists have unearthed sim­i­lar instru­ments else­where, dat­ing from dif­fer­ent peri­ods, but nev­er before has one emerged from the buried remains of a city so rich in leg­endary asso­ci­a­tions. To those in search of a deep­er under­stand­ing of antiq­ui­ty, the site con­tin­ues to sound a siren song of its own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

Hear a Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 12,000-Year-Old Flute That Musi­cal­ly Mim­ics the Sound of Rap­tor Calls

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Lis­ten to a Recon­struc­tion That’s “100% Accu­rate”

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.