Balag

In Mesopotamia, a balag (or balaĝ) refers both to a Sumerian religious literary genre and also to a closely associated musical instrument.

In Mesopotamian religion, Balag prayers were sung by a Gala priest as ritual acts were performed around the instrument.

The purpose of the ritual involving this prayer and instrument was to soothe the local deity with pleasings sounds,[5] while lamenting what may happen to the city should the god decide to abandon it.

[7] As a literary genre, the balag was written in the cuneiform script and sung by the Gala priest in a dialect of Sumerian called Emesal (𒅴𒊩 eme-sal).

Others have claimed it is both of these at once, and another theory suggests the word balag started out referring to a lyre, but over the period of several millennia, it came to mean a drum.