The History of the Lullaby

The oldest lullaby ever recorded

The earliest known lullaby in the world survives on a roughly 5,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet, written in cuneiform. It’s a striking discovery: proof that parents were singing their children to sleep in the very first cities humans ever built, thousands of years before the invention of paper.

Curiously, many of these earliest Mesopotamian lullabies — from the cultures of Babylon, Assyria, Sumer and the Hittite city of Hattusa — weren’t purely sweet. Some carried genuine fear of darkness and night spirits, warning restless babies of shadowy dangers waiting outside if they didn’t settle down. The lullaby, it seems, has always done double duty: comfort and a gentle warning.

Songs of protection

A mid-second-millennium BCE Egyptian text known as the “Magical Lullaby” shows a similar instinct: its lyrics call on protective magic to guard a sleeping child from evil spirits through the night. Long before modern baby monitors, the lullaby itself was the watch kept over a child until morning.

A song with no single author

For most of human history, lullabies were never written down at all. They lived entirely in memory, passed from mother to daughter, grandmother to grandchild, reshaped slightly with every telling. This is exactly why so many of the songs in our own library — from Samoa’s Moe Moe Pepe to Brazil’s Nana Neném — have no known composer: they belong to everyone who ever sang them.

Where “lullaby” comes from

The English word lullaby is first recorded around 1560, and its origin is wonderfully literal: it’s thought to combine the soft “lu lu” or “la la” sound mothers and nurses made to soothe a baby, with “by” or “bye bye” — another gentle, repeated lulling sound. In other words, the word for the song is built entirely out of the sounds of the song itself.

You can hear the same instinct echoed across languages worldwide: Spanish arrorró, Tamil aararo, Hebrew numi numi, Samoan moe moe — different words, but strikingly similar rhythms of repeated, softly rocking syllables.

From memory to the printed page

As folk-song collecting became fashionable across Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars and composers began writing down the lullabies they heard sung by ordinary families — the first time many of these melodies were ever fixed on paper. Songs like England’s Rock-a-bye Baby and Germany’s Schlaf, Kindlein, Schlaf entered print during this era, becoming the “classic” versions still sung today.

This is also when well-known composers began writing their own art-song lullabies inspired by the folk tradition — most famously Johannes Brahms, whose 1868 Wiegenlied (“Brahms’ Lullaby”) remains one of the most recognisable melodies on Earth.

What we now know

Modern sleep and neuroscience research has spent the last few decades confirming what parents have always somehow known: slow, repetitive, low-pitched singing genuinely calms a baby’s nervous system, slows heart rate, and supports deeper sleep. What began as pure instinct 5,000 years ago on a Mesopotamian clay tablet turns out to be backed by real biology.

Curious how that actually works? We wrote a whole guide to it: Why Lullabies Really Work.