Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress
in Washington D.C. Mary-Jane Deeb: Good afternoon
and thank you all for coming.
I'm Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle East division.
And this is the seventh in our --
well, the eighth in our series of programs on Iraq this year.
And we thank you for being, many of you,
for coming back to some of our programs.
Today is a very special -- we have a very special program.
It is on a topic that we don't often bring up or discuss at the Library
or in Washington, D.C., and yet, this program has been shown,
performed at the Smithsonian, at the Indian Museum this past weekend.
And the speaker today is Andy Lowings.
And Mr. Lowings is originally a project manager, a civil engineer
who has spent much of his life in large-scale construction
in Europe and the Middle East.
He worked helping to create the city of Dubai and back
in the United Kingdom in the '80s and was one of a small team
of engineers in building the great tunnel under the English Channel,
known as the Channel Project.
Besides his engineering career, he literally began
to develop a greater interest in music and harp music in particular.
Starting from a small idea, a poignant scene of mass suicide
in ancient Mesopotamia, and the discovery and a cache
of musical instruments last placed 4,500 years ago,
he started a new project, one that he readily admits has been one
of the most frustrating but also one
of the most satisfying in his career.

In April 2003, Andy Lowings formed the group to remake an authentic
but playable version of the famous gold lyre of Ur,
damaged in Baghdad during the war.
Inspiration for this came from stone carvings on view
in the Chicago [unintelligible] Museum that shows some
of the earliest stringed instruments ever built.
This had never been done before, authentically,
using the correct original adhesives, Sumerian region wood
and correct gold quality and thickness.
The skills needed for remaking this harp exist in the world today,
and he asked some of the very best craftsmen to assist him
by donating their time and their work to this project.
It was important that the authenticity reflect the antiquity
of this famous harp.
The bull-headed lyre, held in the museum of Baghdad,
has been well featured in the world's press as a result of events
in Iraq, much interest in been shown in hearing
about the remake and playable instrument.
Today, we're going to have the story behind the harp and I would
like to take this occasion to thank Rex Hudson
of the Federal Research division who has been the person who was moved
by the idea, the concept, and reached out to the entire Library
to try to bring this story, which is unique to the Library,
and has worked with Eric, who is here in Washington
and has been behind supporting this project, as has the Embassy of Iraq.
So again, without further ado, I would like to introduce Andy Lowings
to tell us the story of the gold lyre of Ur.
Thank you.
[applause] Andy Lowings: Thank you so much, Dr. Deeb,
for that nice introduction.
And thank you very much for welcoming us here today.
Thank you for Eric and Rex for making it happen.
It's such an honor to be here, of course,
and I hope we can do it justice,
this beautiful building that we're in today.
Thank you very much.
I'm Andy Lowings as -- I'm a harpist, I'm a musician,
project manager from London, England.
And I'll begin in 2003 where I was inspired to look
into the earliest stringed instruments,
being a harp player myself.
I did some research and pretty soon came
to this beautiful instrument in the Baghdad museum.
That was about the week of April, 2003,
which is a very significant event.
It was the time that the Baghdad museum was vandalized
and it was in the world's press.
It seemed to be rather coincidence that I was interested in this lyre
about the very date that it was actually vandalized
and found broken in the car park.
These times of Ur, about four and a half thousand years ago,
just to put in context, we're in 2009 now,
a thousand years ago was the Norman conquest of United Kingdom.
2,000 years ago was the time of Christ; 3,000 years ago was the time
of the creation of the Bible books, into the Bible;
4,000 years ago the time of Babylon.
This instrument comes from four and a half thousand years ago.
The time, so far back in history; it's very much the start
of historical times, of writing, of lawmaking, of the wheel, of arch.
Yet, there was clearly a sophisticated civilization
in Mesopotamia that could create modern looking craftsmanship
and obviously important, well-made instruments.
This touched me greatly when I saw this picture here in Baghdad Museum.

This is the gold lyre of Ur in Baghdad Museum in 2003.
It's, of course, an unplayable instruments;
it's just there behind glass.
Yet it is clearly a beautiful instrument
and for the country of Iraq, highly iconic.
It's one of their most important artifacts I would venture to say.

It comes from a place called Ur, which is one of the city-states
of the lower Tigris and Euphrates.
Originally, Ur was on the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Gulf,
and it was one of many small city-states
which had their own identities, in the lower area of Mesopotamia,
which included modern day Iraq, some of Turkey,
and some of modern day Iran.
In 1929, archaeologists from America, from the British Museum,
and from the Baghdad Museum, 80 feet down in Ur, discovered a,
what seemed to be, a royal grave.
They discovered 68 ladies and six men
who had apparently committed suicide along with a cache
of three lyres and a harp.
This is a very sad scene and when I discovered this picture in 2003, it,
as a musician, it seemed to be so sad that musicians had gone
to their deaths in this grave for some unknown reason,
because we'll never really know.
But the archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley,
when he discovered these lyres in the grave,
he said that he discovered one of the ladies had her arm still
over the harp, still over the lyre, when he excavated it.
And it seemed, he said, "As though she had played 'till the very end."
Very sad scene.
In this death pit, the great death pit,
in the royal grave [unintelligible], you can see them --
all the ladies crouched as if asleep, and there in corner
at the bottom, the four men -- six men rather --
and the pile of instruments there.
All of the ladies had gold hair ribbons, gold jewelry,
lapis lazuli jewelry; they were all dressed identically.
And it seemed to be the scene of a mass suicide,
for each of them held a small cup of perhaps poison
and they're clearly all gone to their death within this royal grave.
Why, we don't know.
This is the lyre of Ur, thank you to John Russell
for the use of this photograph.
As it is today, unfortunately, events took their turn
and the gold lyre was vandalized, and this is where it was,
how it was found, with the gold stripped off it.
And as it is today, in the basement, in pieces.
Fortunately, the gold had -- of the bull's head, was found in the bank.
And so the pieces are essentially there,
so although the model is broken, it can be repaired
and perhaps one day it will be.
These pictures were sent to by Dr. Lamia Gailani
from the Baghdad Museum.
Soon, we got into the project, and we put contacts out,
and we found that people were very helpful, were very supportive
of the idea of making an instrument that could be played.
And the British museum made available a copy of the bull's head
that we could measure and that we could use
to help recreate perfectly the bull's head


Of course, the idea of recreating a playable instrument absolutely
authentically is making work for yourself.
You're doing it the hard way, but we felt that because it was
such an important artifact to the Middle East, we had to do it --
we had to go the extra mile always, to get the proper material.
I spoke to my friend, Dr. Ismail Jalili who is a doctor in Stamford
in England and he told me, "Andy, you must do this properly.
You must do it authentically and I will help you get wood from Iraq."
So he put the call out for cedar wood for the great new project
of lyre on his Web site and three weeks later,
I got a call from Baghdad on my kitchen table.
And it went, "Mr. Lowings, we have your wood.
We are Muslim Aid in Baghdad.   Come and get it."

[laughter] And this just amazed me that someone so far away in 2003,
should take to heart our little project to recreate this instrument.
And I said, "We must treat this very seriously, this instrument.
We must treat this re-creation properly and record it properly."
But having the wood over there in Baghdad wasn't easy to get it
over to Europe, to the maker.
And I walked around the kitchen a lot, thinking, "How do I do this?
How do I do it?"
So I called the REF station, nearby where I lived.
And I said, "Look, I've got a harp,
I'm making a harp that's really important to everyone
and could you bring this wood back?"
And they said, "Look, we've got a war on."
[laughter] "We don't do harps."
And I said, "It's so important to us."
And he said, "Look I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll put it to the chaps on the ground and see what they say, okay?"
"Thank you so much squadron leader, thank you so much."
He said, "Okay, carry on."
So I thought, well, it nearly worked.
But then about a month later, I got a call from the squadron leader.
He said, "The chaps have gone into a safe house in Baghdad
and they've collected your wood, 150 pounds of wood.
They took it in one shot on their shoulder.
They rushed back to the Land Rovers and they smuggled it
on board the airplane and it's in front of my desk here,
would you come and get it?"
[laughter] By the way they called it Operation Plank.
[laughter] So, I was fortunate to collect it,
there at the [unintelligible].
There's my friend Dr. Gailani who himself was very touched
with seeing this wood come from his homeland.
And I realized then that this project could connect people.
So we gave it to the maker, and we made a replica.
We started off with the wooden body and John Letcher,
of Silver Spear Instruments, helped us make it.
And then I said, the next big problem is how do we get the gold?
Because this gold is covered in pure gold, lots and lots of it.
And so, I was again thinking, how do we do it, how do we do it.
So I rang up a friend of mine who was a retired executive
of a gold company and I said, "Could you help us get some gold
for this historic project,
humanitarian project to connect people?"
He said, "Give me a proposal."
So I gave him a proposal and I got a call from AngloGold Ashanti
in South Africa, who said, "We want to buy into this project.
We will supply you with the gold, how much do you want?"
And I said, "Brace yourself.   Brace yourself for this.

It's a lot."   And he said, "Try me, try me."

So I said, "Actually it's getting on for two thirds
of a kilogram of 24 karat gold."   He said, "Okay."


[laughter] So I was just amazed; that's a lot of gold,
almost a kilogram of pure gold.
And on that basis, we then went to a university, to universities --
and this was West Dean College of Art, who specialize
in fine metal conversation and asked them whether they would
like to help us with creating the gold work on the lyre.
And they said yes, they would like to do it and they took delivery
of the gold from AngloGold and their students, under their lecturer,
their tutor Tony Beentjes, made almost a year's worth of work
about creating the gold work on the lyre.
And this is an American student who wrote her paper on it and we remain
in contact with all of these people to this day,
letting them know that we're here.
And so, in a way, the whole project is with us, even today.

We went back to the museum,
and we measured carefully the gold bull's head, which accounts
for almost half of the gold used.
And Daniel Huff, a paramedic on a year's sabbatical from Albuquerque,
who was working at West Dean, spent part of his year --
most of his year, recreating it.
He said it was the most difficult model he'd ever done in his life.
But there it is in bits, and there he is with the finished object.
Absolutely magnificent.
I then had to get the arms of the lyre coated with gold,
the remaining half of it.
And I went to the Royal Goldsmith of Prince Charles.
And I managed to speak to Simon Benney of Nightsbridge London,
and I managed to persuade him
that a couple weeks worth would be a great way of showing sympathy
with events, over music and over this lyre project.
He put on Alun Evans and we worked partly together
to put the gold back on this instrument.
I'll tell you that the thickness is getting on for the thickness
of a credit card; it's really quite thick, very heavy.
And I think probably, it's worth about, present day, about $35,000,
just in material alone, so this is a huge,
a huge symbolic gesture towards the project
that I'm mindful of, even today.
On the front of the lyre, there are these famous cameos showing these
mythical half animals, half humans, doing various things.
We're not sure whether this is Gilgamesh here on the top,

but this is the original picture from the British Museum,
and we had to recreate these shell plaques.
We did this in two ways.
We did it using a modern technique from Liverpool University
who offered to help us using laser cutting techniques.
And the layer side laser engineering
of Liverpool created the four shell plaques for us.
But we also had a second set of shells made for us
by Italian cameo makers, who make it -- who make cameos even to this day
in the same way, by hand.   To finish off the shell plaques,

these are raised cameos inset with bitumen.
There's a lot of bitumen on the instrument and we had
to obtain bitumen direct from Baghdad, and Dr. Lamia Gailani,
again was kind enough to send somebody to heat in Iraq,
where bitumen apparently comes out of the ground quite naturally.
This was the original adhesive in Sumeria,
and this was transported back to us by post from Abu Dabi.
So we get the four front panels there.
This is the Italian -- the Italian set.

Then we had to spend almost a year doing the decoration.
The decoration is composed of lapis lazuli shell, pink limestone.
And we obtained these materials from the original locations, Afghanistan,
Mousol, and shell suppliers who bring
in shell from the Indian Ocean.
Each piece was cut by hand, with a diamond disk and set
into a warm mixture of bitumen and beeswax
that we found was the best setting material.
There were over 5,000 pieces; each piece had to be cut five
or six times, so there's perhaps 25,000 individual cuts


When one cuts these pieces of decorative shell and stone,
you soon realize it's a very, very long, tedious task.
We've even with modern material, even with modern tools,
and how they did it back then in Mesopotamia, I just don't know.
It was -- it just took such a long time.
They must have had endless time, endless patience,
just with a copper disk and sand to cut these very, very hard materials.
But certainly by doing it, you certainly learn a great deal
about how the original people might have worked.
And I felt after some months that I really knew that person
that had created that lyre, all those years ago.
I could see where he'd taken the shortcuts.

When I finished the arms, I started on the sound board, the decoration.
I thought when I finished the arms, that it would be almost over,
but the sound board decoration was as much again.

And we kept a slightly irregular appearance of the decoration.
It's not perfect, and we didn't intend to do it perfectly.
At the base of the sound board,
there are eight small vertical blue sections
of lapis lazuli on the original lyre.
And we felt that this probably indicated eight strings.
There were no strings found on the lyre in the graves,
so we've got no idea of how it might have been strung.
There were some indications that the strings were gut and metallic,
but they have been sinew, or cloth, or hide; we don't really know.
We used gut, as we've used eight strings there.
To tune the instrument, we have the tuning pegs.
These tuning pegs were found in the grave of some of the lyres and some
of the racks that you see there still exist in some
of the Egyptian lyres in the Cairo Museum today.
So using a bit of detective work, we've put them all together,
and it really makes quite an effective tuning mechanism
for the lyre.
It's just as good as modern tuning pegs or machine heads,
and it's still used in the world today.
Another of our discoveries, that these lyres are still existing
in the world, that there are lyre players in East Africa and parts
of the Middle East who seem to play lyres that have a prominence
with these old lyres from Mesopotamia.
Whether they're connected or not, one can never really know,
but speculatively, they might well be.
This is a lyre from Ethiopia, played by Alamu Aga [spelled phonetically].
And it seems to bear distinct resemblances
to the one that we've recreated.
Identical tuning levers, and the knots
and the racks are exactly the same.   Ten strings here.

This is a begona [spelled phonetically],
which is used in religious ceremonies.
It's a very venerated instrument there in Ethiopia.
So then we had it.   The gold lyre was finished.


And we set about -- there's the gold lyre,
and the original one in Baghdad.
We feel if that last player who had her hand over it as she died
in the grave, saw our modern lyre, we feel that she would say,


And these are lyre players, so what do we do with this lyre now?
Having got this beautiful creation, which so many people have had a hand
in creating, what do we do it?
Well, we've gone back the original plaques here --
this is in the Standard of Ur in the British Museum.
Here's a gentleman playing a similar gold bull-headed lyre
with a singer behind.
And we've investigated the music of these lyres.
This is a cuneiform tablet from about the period
that we're talking about, in clay.
There exists, in the British Museum, some hundreds of thousands
of tablets in cuneiform,
some of which have only been translated a couple of times,
some of which might be mis-translated.
Out of those 100,000 tablets, perhaps 90 percent of records,
of beer, of materials, of laws, and contracts.
Ten percent of those -- five percent
of those cuneiform tablets are more interesting, perhaps stories.
But there are about 20 of the tablets which purport
to show what music and how music was played on similar lyres.
And this is one of those tablets.
Of course, I'm no expert in cuneiform or translating.
I'm not an Assyriologist, but we suddenly realized on this project,
that there is a huge body of research, here in the world
about the musicology of these ancient instruments.
Dr. Kilma has done a lot of work on this subject in Berkeley,
and she has indicated the tuning of these lyres
and this is what we've used today.
So this is how we bring it to people's attention.
We have a performance, we play some Babylonian translations,
and we try to bring these old times to life to everybody.
This is an instrument from before everything,
from before Christianity, from before Judaism.
This is an instrument that connects us all
and so nobody can have any fault with us bringing it alive
and to today, and to show the history of those ancient times.
I've got a little piece of music that I can play at the end,
but we do do a performance now and we've been lucky enough
to have two performances in the Smithsonian this week.
Iowa State University of Dance contacted us and said
that they would like to use the story of the lyre
within a choreography, within a ballet,
and their students created this "Death
of the Lyre Player" as a dance here.
And here's the lyre player, here's the lyre, herself; she is the lyre.
It's a beautiful thought that other people are now inspired to go
on and use this instrument.
And our ballet dancer, Diana Sara, from the Royal Covent Garden Ballet,
who does a small piece of choreography
when we perform about the lyre player.
We'd like to do more.
We'd like to join in with Middle Eastern musicians, with writers,
with artists of all types, to try to take the idea
of music crossing boundaries to new levels,
because music is really an international language.
Finally, I think one of the nicest times was
when we had a BBC World Service program on us.
When we managed to bring together a Kurdish musician,
a harpist Tara Jaff, and a Kenyan lyre player --
they still play lyres in Kenya, perhaps connected to these times --
and they played a duet for the radio,
and it was a beautiful moment just to show
that music can absolutely transcend boundaries,
so we want to do more of that.   That's what we want to do.

So thank you very much.   [applause] [Q.] How does the --

how is the box made and how is the construction
of the instrument technically?   That's the question.

There was very little evidence of the construction of the instrument.
There were only slivers of the wood found.
The shape was very much dictated by the decoration on the arms,
which you could draw some conclusion to the shape.
But there may be big holes in our knowledge.
It's by no means set, that this is the exact shape
and the exact materials, even down to some people saying
that the sound board was not wood at all, it was leather.
But there is a silver lyre in existence, which is totally covered
in silver, so that couldn't have been leather,
so we took that to mean
that a wooden sound board would be most appropriate.
It's a six millimeter cedar soundboard,
and the decoration is inlaid in it two and a half millimeters,
which gives it a three and a half millimeter thickness underneath
the soundboard.   It's quite sturdy.

The structure underneath is very carefully jointed,
but in retrospect probably, they didn't do that.
I think possibly they might have even carved it out of a solid lump
of cedar and simply pushed in an arm into the base of the instrument.
There's some evidence of that from the Cairo lyres which have split.
So you can see how they made the Cairo, 1500 B.C. lyres,
which was not in the fashion that we did.
Yes, what is the total cost of lyre
and what is the total cost of the reproduction?

[Q.] The value of the lyre has got a material cost,
which you could probably say is the amount of gold, plus the materials
on it, which account to perhaps $40- $50,000 worth of material.
But the effort and the symbolism and the sheer authenticity of it,
you can't measure that, I hate to say.
It's been a labor of love, everybody knows that we've had to do more
than the minimum and so ,
for an insurance value I think we've made it 30,000 pounds,
but the value to us is not the instrument itself;
it's also the idea of why we've done it.
Does that -- [Q.] We do play it, yes.
Yes I'm -- I have -- I do play it, and although we have a good player,
an excellent player, an American.
Why a harp player living in Britain, Bill Taylor, he was unable to it
to Washington, and so I've played it, and it's a simple instrument.
It's got eight strings; it may not have been a solo instrument.
It may have been something that one had an ensemble of other lyres,
of cymbals, of systrins [spelled phonetically] of voices, of drums,
and that's something that we've got to investigate,
how to bring the lyre to a modern audience
to make it accessible to them.
[Q.] How does the sound compare to the African lyres?
We play this -- we've come at this rather from a harp point of view,
that is played like a harp.
But when I was lucky enough to go to Africa and look at Ethiopia
and Somalia, Kenyan lyre players.
They play this much more rhythmically;
they play it percussively.   And -- [Q.] Yes.

It's -- lyres are played, they're very dull;
they don't have a clear pitch like a harp.
They make -- they do make a pitch but it's a rather --
it's more of a percussive nature.
So for myself, I'm not too worried about the purity of the sound.
It's how we play.
[Q.] Yes? What was the life of Sumer like?
And what was the role of women within Sumerian life?
That's a very good question.
I think as far as I can see, of our research
that woman had a very important role in Sumerian life.
The laws which covered property, marriage, the death of the spouse,
inheritance, were very clear and they were very equal to women.
It's quite possible that women were more equal then than they were
in some times of our modern past.
My colleague, Jennifer Sturdy, knows more about this than I do.
What would you say to this Jennifer?
Jennifer Sturdy: Thank you very much.
My role with the project is --
not only have I been with it from the outset, partly to help
to organize all the things that Andy's been talking about,
but my most recent role is as a performer and so it was me
that you heard on the recording with Bill Taylor playing the lyre,
and I was speaking the poetry.
And so I have a costume and I have a wig and a headdress
and gold jewelry, which is all made in the style of Queen Pu-Abi.
This is the name of the queen who was found in the grave that you saw
on the slides, where the 68 women were.
And so she's called a queen.
They don't know definitely that she was, but she was clearly a women
of considerable status, because of all the possessions that were found,
that were buried with her.
And the fact that she had this retinue of 68 women and 6 men
and ox carts that were laden with the goods that they needed.
And there is the evidence in the writing, from that time,
the very earliest days of Sumer,
that women did have a very equal role in the society of that time,
which I find very attractive and very progressive.
Because subsequently, I think perhaps they didn't have quite
so much of a role to play.
But Sumer precedes the era of Babylon, the era of Acadia,
and it seems for some considerable period,
that women did have an amazing amount of autonomy.
There is evidence that it was not only boys that were educated
but that girls were educated as well,
which I think for most people's sensitivities would indicate a
culture that was considerably ahead of its time.
I don't know if there's any other questions that I might be able
to answer about the poetry or the literature or something,
because that's part of the research that I've been engaged in.
Yes? Andy Lowings: When was this lyre used?
How was it used?
I personally think that this was such a valuable instruments
that it would have probably been within a temple or kept
within some ceremonial purpose.
But there were, as you saw, the little champee
with the lyre and the singer.
There were clearly cheaper versions that were used in entertainment
and in the wider society.
So, I think this one is definitely a highly prized, a royal lyre.
And, but there would have been cheaper versions
like perhaps today's instruments.
Jennifer Sturdy: I think there probably there is evidence,
the fact that there were at least four instruments found
in this particular grave, and there have been other instruments found
as well and also little silver pipes as well.
Not only the stringed instruments that were found,
but there was probably some kind of a consort, and I think the evidence
on the Standard of Ur, of this little portable one,
that was carried in procession.
I kind of imagine that they paraded with it, they processed with it
and that presumably, being a very valuable instrument
because of all the decoration that was on it,
that would have been used for special occasions.
And, in fact, the lyres that they use today, maybe the modern legacy
in Africa; they play them in consorts and they have them,
very often, for very, very special occasions, sometimes associated
with religious ceremonies, sometimes with sort of family celebrations.
But there's still an awful lot of these cuneiform tablets
to be translated so maybe we shall yet find the evidence
of exactly how the instruments were played.
But I think it's fair to say that they were very revered
and very venerated instruments and that harp players, again the fact
that harp players were women, is another kind of significant thing,
that they were held with considerable status I'm sure.
Andy Lowings: The techniques back then were very, very primitive.
It is the very earliest period of Mesopotamia -- of technology.
As far as I know, they didn't have carburendum [spelled phonetically];
they didn't have harder materials to cut; they'd not discovered diamonds.
They had copper.
They had time, which you can tell how long it took us
and they had even more time.
And they had slaves, and they had lots of labor,
so presumably they had banks of people, with laves,
cutting these pieces of shell.
But for myself, I have such admiration
for their tenacity in doing this.
I know we took six diamond blades to cut those pieces over eight months.
And if the diamonds get blunt,
and you move on to copper, you stop dead.
You just can't -- you just -- it just takes forever.
Presumably, they would put little bits of sand
in to help the cutting process.   It must have taken them some time.

[Q.] Yes, that's right.
Run by Iraqi, Baghdad batteries perhaps.
I think there's -- that the fellow carrying it was playing a very light
version, a much smaller one.
This one is that big -- this one is one meter,
200 high, one meter, 300 wide.
It weighs 17 kilograms, and we only just got it
onto the airplane underneath the weight, thanks to United Airlines
for being so keen for us to come here.
We have a CD in process and if you'd like to speak to us later,
maybe we can send you a copy as soon as it's been finalized.
[Q.] Jennifer Sturdy: The question is whether the poetry is related
to Greek lyrical poetry at all.
It's very, very much earlier, considerably earlier,
and so there is evidence of both literature and music moving
around in the Mediterranean, and certainly things like Grecian lyres,
Cretan lyres; people suggest that it was related
to this very early Sumerian lyre.
As far as poetry's concerned, it's very, very much older.
All I can say is in the themes and stories that I've come
across so far, so like some of the things that we perform
at the Smithsonian Museum: the relationship between a girl
and her lover, how is she going to lie to her mother
about making a secret assignation?
Some of the conversations between brother and sister, the sentiments,
the emotions that are expressed, are really true for all times.
So I supposed you could say it is a predecessor of the stuff
that you do find in Greek lyrical poetry,
but that's generally very much more sophisticated poetic form,
probably than this really, fairly primitive poetry.
Having said that, of course, there's the wonderful, very long
and extensive "Epic of Gilgamesh," which is where that extract
that you heard is taken from in fact.
So they did have epic poetry,
but quite what the exact relationship would be
with what came later, is maybe another piece
of research yet to be done.
[Q.] Adam Lowings: Where are we going with the project
and what are we going to do with it?
This -- I feel that there's two levels on the project.
One is the actual re-creation.
It's a beautiful instrument within its own right,
but we're always mindful that this is a historic artifact that's
venerated highly in the Middle East.
And if it's born out of anything, it's born out for my sympathy
for the terrible events that are going on in the Middle East.
And as a musician, I can't do much about it, but I think through this,
through recreating this instrument, we've made great friends
with many people who ordinarily, we wouldn't have come across.
So it has bridged gaps and I think I speak for all of the team
who have helped to make this; we can do more of this.
It's a force for good.
So if you have ideas yourself, I'm always open to some suggestion
of how we -- what we can do with this instrument.
And let's do more of it.   Thank you.

[applause] Mary-Jane Deeb: Well -- that --
I really want to thank Andy Lowings.
I want to thank Jennifer and everybody who worked on that project
because it's really inspiring.
It shows you the power of a dream and what it can actually achieve
and will continue achieving.
So thank you for being with us, and I'll hope you come back.
Andy Lowings: Thank you so much, thank you.

[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]