Drumhead-making in Ancient Mesopotamia from Philological, Ethnographic, and Experimental Perspectives

In Ancient Mesopotamia, there was a specific ritual to cover the kettledrum (lilissu) with its head and to make it playable for the cult. Three first-millennium accounts of said ritual (KAR 60: rev. 5–8, BaM Beih. 2, 5: rev. 10–11, and TCL 6, 44: obv. ii 20–25) describe the ingredients and steps to fashion a dyed-red drumhead of leather for the lilissu. However, their variants and unusual steps (e.g., drumheads are normally of rawhide, not leather) have led scholars to see these instructions in different ways so far. Hereby I present the results of my postdoctoral project between the HUJI and UGR to study these instructions from philology, but also from ethnography (with interviews to drummakers, leather-workers, sofrei STAM, and experts on dyeing techniques in Israel/Palestine, Greece, and Iraq) and experimentation with real animal hides following these instructions and mounting them on different membranophones.