評論
打印
But, should he and his possessions be here anyway? Questions like this crop up frequently -where do things from the past belong now? Should everything be exhibited where it was originally made? I'll be coming back to these questions at various points in the programmes. But I asked the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Souief how she felt about seeing so many Egyptian antiquities so far from home:
但是，他和他的財產應該陳列在這里嗎？這樣的問題經常出現：這些古董屬于哪里？它們是否應陳列在發源地？在這一系列節目中，我會時常回到這些問題。我問埃及作家阿達芙·蘇耶夫(Ahdaf Souief)，看到大量的埃及展品“背井離鄉”，她感覺如何：
'Ultimately it's probably no bad thing to have Egyptian obelisks and stones and statues sprinkled all over the world. It reminds us of ages of colonialism, yes, but it also reminds the world of our common heritage.' It's that idea of a common heritage that's become more and more apparent and more important to me, the longer I spend working in the British Museum. Personally, I think it's never been more important than now to think about the history of the world as one shared story.
“從根本上說，也許埃及方尖碑、石碑及雕塑流落于世界各地不是件壞事。這一事實雖然不斷提醒我們埃及長達幾個世紀的殖民史，但也同時提醒世界這些古董是人類的共同財產。”在大英博物館工作的時間越長，我越能感受到“人類共同財產”這一概念的明確性和重要性。我個人認為，當前最重要的就是將世界歷史看做一部全人類共同參與的歷史。
'If I could decree a universal education programme, I would make every child in the world learn a brief history of the entire world that focused on the common ground. It would examine how people perceive their relationship to each other, to the planet, and to the universe, and it would see human history as a kind of ongoing joint project, where one lot of people picked up where another had left off.' (Ahdaf Soueif)
“如果我可以開展一場全民教育活動，我將讓世界上的每個孩子學習以共同基礎為重點的世界簡史，探究人類如何感知自己同他人、地球和宇宙的關系。人類的歷史將被視為一項聯合，互補，持續不斷的偉大工程。”——阿達芙·蘇耶夫(Ahdaf Soueif)
I started this programme with the sound of a star whose explosion was seen across half the world around 1066. But the story of people making things began nearly two million years ago. And once again, the radio telescope can let us tune in to the echo of another dying star that those ancestors, nearly two million years ago, would have been able to see - but at this point all our ancestors lived in Africa.
節目開始時，我們播放了一顆恒星發出的聲音，半個地球的人于1066年左右見證了它的大爆炸。然而，人類造物的故事始于近200萬年前。通過無線電天文望遠鏡，我們再次聽到了另一顆即將隕落的恒星的回響，而200萬年前，我們的祖先能用肉眼觀察到它，但當時，我們所有人的祖先都生活在非洲大陸。
If at that moment, 1.8 million years ago, you had been gazing up at the exploding star from the Rift Valley of East Africa, you might well have heard the sound of the earliest human hands, creating the oldest known humanly made 'thing'. Those hands were shaping stone tools; tools that represent the first step on the great journey of shaping our world. For me, it's making 'things' and then coming to depend on 'things' that sets us apart from all other animals and, ultimately, turns us into the humans we are today. It's one of those very first stone tools that I'm going to be looking at in the next programme.
如果180萬年前的那一刻，你正立于東非大裂谷仰望著那顆爆炸的恒星，也許你還能聽到初民用雙手創造已知的最古老的“人造物”的聲響。那雙手在塑造石質工具，它們象征著人類改造世界偉大征程的第一步。我認為，正是制作物品和依賴物品把我們同動物區別開來，并最終使我們進化成今天的人類。下期節目我要介紹的正是一件初民時期的石質工具。
