The most ancient specimen of Greek music that has survived until our time should be considered to be the work published by the lesuite monk Athanasios Kircher in his work Musurgia Universalis (Rome 1650 vol. 1 541-42) presenting it as an extract from Pindar's first Pythionic. The monk claimed to have copied the melody from a manuscript discoverd in the library of a monastery near Messina. The manuscript mentioned by Kircher was never found. Thus most scholars believe that the extract from the first Pythionic Hymn is fake. Since the possibility of theft or destruction of the manuscript was not taken into consideration, we propose it to you in its first execution.

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