The World's Oldest Recorded Song

The Seikilos epitaph is a marble tombstone from the first century that has a song recorded in its stone inscription. The large letters, in Koine Greek, contain a poem about grief.They are accompanied by marks above each word that indicate the musical notation. The stone was discovered in 1893 in the town of Ayden, Turkey, and followed a circuitous route to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, where it resides today. 

We have documentary evidence of older songs, but those are in fragments, while this stone contains a complete song. The musical notation on the Seikilos epitaph is not so old that it couldn't be translated, and that's why we are able to hear the song as it was meant to heard. The lyrics are appropriate to a tombstone, about the fleetingness of life and the futility of grief. Instead, we are encouraged to enjoy life while we have it.