Girl With A Musical Instrument

In July 1995, Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Turk discovered a bone carving in the northwest region of Slovenia. The carving, named the Divje Babe flute, features four holes that Canadian musicologist Bob Fink determined could have been used to play four notes of a diatonic scale. Researchers estimate the flute's age to be between 43,400 and 67,000 years, making it the oldest known musical instrument and the only musical instrument associated with the Neanderthal culture. However, some archaeologists question the flute's status as a musical instrument. German archaeologists have found mammoth bone and swan bone flutes dating back to 30,000 to 37,000 years old in the Swabian Alps. The flutes were made in the Upper Paleolithic age, and are more commonly accepted as being the oldest known musical instruments.
Archaeological evidence of musical instruments was discovered in excavations at the Royal Cemetery in the Sumerian city of Ur. These instruments include nine lyres, two harps, a silver double flute, sistra and cymbals. A set of reed-sounded silver pipes discovered in Ur was the likely predecessor of modern bagpipes. The cylindrical pipes feature three side-holes that allowed players to produce whole tone scales. These excavations, carried out by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, uncovered non-degradable fragments of instruments and the voids left by the degraded segments which, together, have been used to reconstruct them. The graves to which these instruments were related have been carbon dated to between 2600 and 2500 BCE, providing evidence that these instruments were being used in Sumeria by this time.
Archaeologists in the Jiahu site of central Henan province of China, has found flutes made of bones that dates back to 7,000 and 9,000 years old, and they represent some of the "earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated, multinote musical instruments" ever found.
A cuneiform tablet from Nippur in Mesopotamia dated to 2000 BCE indicates the names of strings on the lyre and represents the earliest known example of music notation.