New Ancient Strings (French: Nouvelles cordes anciennes) is a studio album by the Malian musicians Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko, released on 22 June 1999 by the British label Hannibal Records.

Their duets were recorded in a single live take within a marble hallway of Bamako's conference centre on the night of 22 September 1997, coinciding with Mali's Independence Day.

Having brought the kora to wider attention with these genre fusion projects, New Ancient Strings represented his return to his roots in acoustic Mande music.

Several artists have cited the album among their personal favourites, notably the Icelandic pop star Björk, who professed its influence on her own music and later recorded with Diabaté.

A kora was historically played only by a jeli (plural jeliw)—also known as a griot[b]—a member of a hereditary class of musicians and storytellers responsible for conveying cultural history through oral tradition.

[3] Sidiki Diabaté and Djelimadi Sissoko—both kora-playing jeliw born in Gambia from malians parents—relocated to Bamako to join the Ensemble Instrumental National du Mali [fr].

[2] In 1987, Toumani Diabaté first collaborated with ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán on the production of his debut album, Kaira, which became the first commercially released recording of instrumental music for solo kora.

For the recording of New Ancient Strings, Durán flew from the United Kingdom to Mali's capital city of Bamako with audio engineer Nick Parker.

[c] After a period of location-scouting, they received permission to conduct a nighttime session inside the city's then recently completed conference centre, the Palais des Congrès.

By comparison, Parker felt the Palais des Congrès rivaled European recording studios for its remarkable interior silence, and was "all the more extraordinary when you take into account how very quiet these instruments are in reality.

[10] Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post said the kora duets "suggest Bach more than Robert Johnson"—distinguishing New Ancient Strings from Diabaté's next album, Kulanjan, a collaboration with the American musician Taj Mahal intended to emphasize continuities between West African music and blues in the United States.

[10] In a review for British magazine The Wire, Julian Cowley predicted the album "will surely prove to be a defining moment in the history of recorded kora music".

[23] At JazzTimes, Josef Woodard wrote that "this album, beautifully played and sensitively realized, confirms our suspicions that the kora is not only one of the most fascinating and inspiring instruments in Africa, but in the world at large.

"[24] Canadian critic Roger Levesque, who gave the album a five-star rating in Edmonton Journal, said it "offers a wonderful, airy, multi-layered sound as a simultaneous source of melody and pulsing rhythms ... but as often as not the two musicians conjure up a dreamlike atmosphere that serves well for ambient aural backdrops.".

[27] Former Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré (in office from 2002–2012) presented important guests and dignitaries with a miniature kora and a copy of New Ancient Strings as a diplomatic gift.

[32] The British magazine Songlines ranked New Ancient Strings at 20th place in its 2003 list of the top 50 "must-have world-music" albums[33] and, in 2021, as the third most-essential recording of kora music.

[9] Tom Moon included the album in his 2008 book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, writing that Diabaté and Sissoko "engage in fiery jazz-like back-and-forth exchanges" and "sustain an intense conversation throughout, trading solo and accompaniment roles seamlessly, generating spiderwebbed clusters of notes that, despite all the finger wizardry, communicate on a pure spirit level.