2016年4月20日功课

THE SUMERIANS

苏美尔人

THE SUMERIAN NAIL WRITERS, WHOSE CLAY TABLETS TELL US THE STORY OF ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA, THE GREAT SEMITIC MELTING-POT

苏美尔的指甲作家用陶板为我们讲述了亚述,巴比伦,以及伟大的闪族相互融合的故事。

2016年4月21日功课

THE fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay.

十五世纪是一个大发现的时代。哥伦布试图探索一条通往卡塞岛的路径，意外发现了一个全新的未知的大陆。一个奥地利主教率领一支探险队向东方行进，意图寻找莫斯科公国的发源地。但这还是一个注定失败的旅程，因为莫斯科要到下一个世代才被西方人访问。同时一个叫巴贝罗的威尼斯人考查了西亚的废墟，他带回一些关于一门奇特语言的报告。他发现这些雕刻在设拉子庙宇的岩石里和无数片陶土上。

2016年4月22日功课

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first ``cuneiform inscriptions'' (so-called because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called ``Cuneus'' in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German school-master by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

但是欧洲人一直忙于别的事情，直到18世纪末，第一块“楔形文字”（之所以这么叫，是因为这些文字是楔形的，而楔形用拉丁语就是“Cuneus”）才被一个叫做“尼布尔”的丹麦调查者带到欧洲。然后，三十年过去了，一个耐心的叫做提芬的德国校长才首次破译了四个字母：D，A，R和SH，也就是波斯国王大流士的名字。又过了20年，一个叫做亨利罗林森的英国官员，发现了著名的贝希斯顿铭文，这为人们破解西亚雕刻文字提供了一把有用的钥匙。

2016年4月23日功课

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of Champollion had been an easy one.The Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed. A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows:

与破译这些雕刻文字的难题相比，商博良的工作就显得简单一些。埃及人使用图片（记事）。但苏美尔人，美索不达米亚最早的原著民，想出办法在陶板上刻出他们的文字。他们完全放弃了图片(记录),发展出一套楔形图形(记录)系统。这些图形和它们最初发展的原型已很少有关联。我将通过一些例子来展示给你我指的什么。从一个星开始，当用指甲画到砖上时看起来是下面的样子:

2016年4月24日功课

This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of ``heaven'' was added to that of star the picture was simplified in this way

不过这个图形太复杂了，经过一段时间后，那个星型图案多了一层“天空”的意思，并被简化成了下面这个样子。

which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from

简化后就更难理解了。同样的方式，公牛的图案也由这个

into

变成了这个。

and a fish changed from

同样的一条鱼由这个

into

简化成这个。

The sun was originally a plain circle

太阳原本是一个简单的圆圈，

and became

变成了下面的样子。

If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an

如果今天我们用苏美尔人的书写方式制作这幅图，

look like

大概会是这样的。

This system of writing down our ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the fertile valley.

在我们看来这种书写方式太过复杂，但是三十个世纪以来，它被苏美尔人、巴比伦人、亚述人、波斯人，以及所有其它各个来这片肥沃土地谋生的族群所使用。

2016年4月25日功课

The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They were a white People who had lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their Gods on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians but we do not know it. The Sumerians were entirely absorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of Bab-Illi, or towers of Babel.

美索不达米亚的故事是一个无休止的冲突与争霸的故事。首先是来自北方的苏美尔人。他们是白人，曾经住在山上。他们习惯了在山顶祭祀他们的上帝。他们进入平原后，他们建造了人工小山丘，在山丘顶上盖起了他们的祭坛。他们还不会建造台阶，因此围绕祭坛建了斜坡的走廊。我们（现在的）工程师学会了这个方法，就像你会在大型铁路车站看到的那样，上升的走廊有一层通向另一层。我们或许也从苏美尔人哪里借鉴了别的主意，只是我们不知道罢了。苏美尔人的文化被后来进入这片肥沃河谷的其他民族完全消化学习了。他们的祭祀塔仍然矗立在美索不达米亚的废墟中间。犹太人在巴比伦地区流亡时看到过这些塔，他们称这些塔为“Bab-Illi（土耳其语巴别塔）”或巴别塔。

2016年4月26日功课

In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards over-powered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are known as the ``Semites,'' because in the olden days people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient world. Next the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, overran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most important capital of that day. 

在4000年以前，苏美尔人进入了美索不达米亚平原。后来他们很快被阿卡得人统治了，阿卡得人是来自阿拉伯沙漠的众多部落中的一只，他们讲一种通用的语言，他们被称为“闪族人”。因为过去人们认为他们是闪的直系后裔，闪是诺亚三个儿子中的一个。一千年以后，阿卡得人被迫接受亚摩利人的统治，他们是另一只沙漠闪族部落。亚摩利人伟大的汉谟拉比国王在圣城巴比伦为自己建造了雄伟壮丽的宫殿，汉谟拉比给他的子民们制定了一系列的法律，这使得巴比伦成为古代管理最好的帝国。接下来是希泰人，你能在《旧约全书》里看到他们，掠夺了这片富饶的河谷，凡是不能带走的都被他们破坏了。风水轮流转，希泰人被沙漠之王——阿舒尔的追随者们征服了，这些人称自己为亚述人。亚述人建立了尼尼微城，该城是庞大的令人生畏的（亚述）帝国的首都。亚述帝国征服了整个西亚和埃及，无数的臣服部落向它缴税。直到七世纪末，基督诞生，迦勒底人重建巴比伦城，是之成为当时最重要的都城。

2016年4月27日功课

Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which were discovered by the Chaldeans. In the year 538 B.C. a crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province. Next came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the second centre of the world's civilisation, became a vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.

尼布加尼撒，古巴比伦最著名的国王，鼓励进行科学研究。我们现在的天文学与数学的知识都是基于迦勒底人发现的第一原则建立起来的。在公元前538年，一个残暴的波斯游牧部落入侵了这片古老的土地，并摧毁了迦勒底帝国。200年之后，他们又被亚历山大大帝击败。这片肥沃的河谷将如此之多的闪族部落融合到一起，他将这古老的民族熔炉变成了希腊的一个省。接下来是罗马人，罗马人之后是土耳其人，最后美索不达米亚这个世界第二的文明发源地变成一片巨大的废墟，只留下那高山述说古老的繁荣往事。