The thread seems to have veered, but neumes, which are an assortment of written marks, were used to notate western church music from the eight century on--however, what they actually meant is another thing entirely--and this is the problem with all but the most recent music notation--

The thing is that music notation is representational--it is a system for telling a player or singer which of a variety of sounds and time values to play--but notes, time values, and intervals have been learned either from a master or simply by listening to the music itself-- the father you get from the living tradition, the harder it is to determine what the notation means--even Beethoven and Mozart sounded differerent when they were originally played--though we know enough about the differences to be able to be able to reconstruct the sound fairly accurately--

To a great extent, recreating old music from texts is a process of inspired guessing--