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Seikilos Epitaph Stele (Tralleis Music Inscription)
Reading the place
Not one monument, but a layered setting.
On the Seikilos stele, poem and melody share a single marble surface. Found near Tralleis in 1883 during railway works, the inscribed stone is now held in Copenhagen’s National Museum of Denmark.
Aydın · efeler
From Tralleis to Copenhagen
The findspot lies near Tralleis, in present-day Efeler, Aydın; Copenhagen is the object’s current home. The distinction matters: this is a museum object, not a monument still standing at its discovery site. The National Museum of Denmark catalogues it as object 14897.
A Roman-era song, broadly dated
The inscription is broadly dated to the first or second century CE. Its poem reflects on life’s brevity and urges the living to take joy in life. Letters alongside the words encode musical notation. The damaged “EUTER-” name has more than one proposed reading; the stone does not establish Seikilos’s identity or the name’s completion.
Reading the notes as music
Readers encounter the work as both poem and score. Armand D’Angour examines its surviving melody and rhythm signs, showing what can be recovered from the inscription itself. Those marks offer a way into the song without requiring a speculative biography for Seikilos.
The oldest complete surviving song
The Seikilos song is often described as the oldest complete surviving notated song; older examples of musical notation survive only in fragments. That qualification sets this inscription apart. The stone’s journey from a findspot near Tralleis to Copenhagen leaves a telling distance between where it was discovered and where its words and notes can be read today.
Narratives that include this place
Periods
- Roman era
- The Aegean today