評論
打印
We will get to the very beginning of human history, but I'm not going to start there because I want to begin with the mummies -which is where I began when I first came through these doors into the British Museum in 1954 at the age of eight, and I think that's where most people begin when they first visit a museum.
我們以后會回到初民時期，但是我的故事并不始于彼時，因為我打算先講述木乃伊——1954年八歲的我第一次穿越大英博物館的重門，首先映入眼簾的便是那些木乃伊，它們是我探索世界史的開端。我猜測多數訪客的博物館之行也始于此處。
It's a pretty safe bet that most of the children you can hear round about me are also headed for the Egyptian mummies. What fascinated me then was the mummies themselves, the thrilling gruesome thought of the dead bodies, but I'm now much more interested in the mummy cases - and I've chosen one particular mummy case for this opening programme, because it carries all the different kinds of messages across the millennia, signals from the past if you like, that 'things' can communicate to us, and that I'm going to be looking for in all the objects in this series.
我敢說你現在聽到的我身邊這些孩子也是沖著木乃伊去的。當時我著迷的是那些木乃伊本身，它們激起了我對死尸既興奮又恐懼的想象，但現在我對這些木乃伊的案例更感興趣。我特別為首期節目選擇了這一典型的木乃伊案例，因為它攜帶了“人造物”所能傳遞的穿越千載的遠古音信。在這一系列節目中，我將在這些物品中探求這些音信。
Telling history through things, whether it's a mummy's coffin or a credit card, is what museums are for and, because the British Museum has collected things from all over the globe, it's not a bad place to try to tell a world history. Of course it can only be 'a' history of the world, not 'the' history.
通過如木乃伊棺材或信用卡這樣的物品講述歷史，是所有博物館的目標和功能。大英博物館是用來復述世界簡史的一個不錯的選擇，因為它搜集了世界各地的物品。當然，它所能講述的只是世界“簡史”，而非世界“歷史”。
When people come to the museum, they choose their own objects and make their own journey round the world and through time, but I think what they will find, is that their own histories quickly intersect with everybody else's -and when that happens, you no longer have a history of a particular people or nation, but a story of endless connections. Nobody has thought more deeply about this than the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen:
人們造訪博物館時，會依據個人喜好瀏覽展品，制定自己的時空之旅。但我想，人們會發現，其本族歷史旋即與外族史縱橫交錯，此時，歷史已經不再局限于某個民族或國家，而是一個無限延伸、環環相扣的故事。關于這點，印度經濟學家、諾貝爾獎得主阿瑪蒂亞·森(Amartya Sen)的認識最為深刻：
'I think what is really very important to recognise is that, when we look at the history of the world, we're not looking at the history of different civilisations truncated and separated from each other. They've a huge amount of contact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness.
“我認為認識到這點非常重要，即縱觀世界歷史，我們看到的并非各大文化彼此隔絕分離的歷史。各種文化之間交流豐富，存在著某種內在聯系。
So I've always felt, not to think of the history of the world as a history of civilisations, but as a history of world civilisations evolving in often similar, often diverse ways, always interacting with each other. And this is a very different view from the clash of civilisations to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to understand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the general condition of the relationship between people across the world in history.'
所以我始終認為，不應把世界歷史視為各種文化的簡單結合體，而應是其相互作用，遵循相似又相異的軌道不斷進化的歷史。我的觀點很大程度上背離了幾年前提出的文化沖突論。文化沖突是我們理解世界敵對狀態的一種方法，但縱觀世界歷史，這種狀態并非人類關系的主流?！?/p>
Most of us I think, if we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, have the sense that we've changed enormously, while the things have remained serenely the same, but of course they haven't. Thanks to constant research and to new scientific techniques, what we can know about them is constantly growing. I'm standing now in front of one of the most impressive mummy cases in the British Museum. It was made around 240 BC for a high-ranking Egyptian priest called Hornedjitef.
回到童年時代參觀過的博物館，我們大多會感慨物是人非。然而，這些物品卻一直靜止不動，但是當然，它們不可能變化的。隨著持續的研究和科技的進步，我們對它們的了解不斷增長。我現在就站在大英博物館木乃伊展品中最令人印象深刻的木乃伊身前。它大約制作于公元前240年，主人是一位名為霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)的埃及高級牧師。
There's a massive black outer case in the shape of a human body, there's an elaborately decorated inner case, and then the mummy itself. Everything we know about Hornedjitef, we know from this group of things. He is his own document if you like, and it's a document that continues to give up its secrets. My colleague, John Taylor, has been researching the mummies in the British Museum for over 20 years - I asked him what we have learnt about Hornedjitef since he came to the British Museum:
它包括一個巨大的黑色人形棺套，一個精心裝飾的內棺，以及木乃伊本身。我們對霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)的了解均來自這套物品。你可以說霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)就是他自己的一部歷史文獻，不斷地泄露著自己的秘密。我的同事約翰·泰勒(John Taylor)從事博物館的木乃伊研究已逾20年，我詢問他自霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)被移駕到博物館以來，我們了解到了哪些知識：
