An old buddy of mine on Facebook linked to this:
And let me add my voice to the chorus, as it was: stuff like this is an approximation, mostly because ‘approximation’ sounds better than ‘guess.’ We don’t have recordings, physical artifacts from the era are few and far between, and trying to decipher previous generations’ systems of musical notation (assuming that those generations even bothered to write that stuff down) can drive men mad. It’s not entirely certain that the Epic of Gilgamesh sounded like that when sung, back in the day.
But it’s danged pretty, no? Also: doing it this way at least reminds folks that poetry began as a verbal form, and stubbornly stays that way, academia be damned. I suspect that more kids would be interested in verse in school if, hey, more people recited it to them…