Music of Iraq
music and musical traditions of Iraq
The music of Iraq (Arabic: موسيقى عراقية mūsīqā ʿirāqiyya) spans numerous genres across many different cultures and ethnic groups, including Mesopotamian Arabic, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Turkmen, among others. Apart from the traditional music of these peoples, Iraqi music includes contemporary music styles like pop, rock, soul and urban contemporary. Prominent instruments used in the production of many Iraqi musical works include the oud, Iraqi santur, and rebab.
History
Instruments
In 1929, archaeologists led by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley, representing a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, discovered the Lyres of Ur or Harps of Ur, which are considered to be the world's second oldest surviving stringed instruments when excavating the Royal Cemetery of Ur between from 1922 and 1934. They discovered pieces of three lyres and one harp in Ur, located in what was Ancient Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. They are over 4,500 years old, from ancient Mesopotamia during the Early Dynastic III Period (2550–2450 BC). The decorations on the lyres are fine examples of the court art of Mesopotamia of the period.
Classical Iraqi music
Iraqi classical music necessitates some discussion of the social environment, as well as references to the poetry. Poetry is always rendered clearly. Poetry is the art of the Iraqis, and sung poetry is the finest of all.
“Music of Iraq” enters the record as music and musical traditions of Iraq. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Music, Iraq and music can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3328692. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1922 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Music of Iraq” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.