評論
打印
Chapter 08
第八章
The Sumerians
蘇美爾人
The Sumerian Nall Writers, Whose Clay Tablets Tell us the story of Assyria and Babylonia The Great Semitic Melting Pot
蘇美爾人用刻在泥版上的楔形文字給我們講述了閃米特人的大熔爐--亞述和巴比倫王國的故事
The fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries.
15世紀是一個地理大發現的世紀。
Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent.
哥倫布想要找到一條通往香料群島的水路，卻意料之外地來到了美洲新大陸。
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,
一位奧地利主教出資裝備了一支探險隊，向東方去探尋莫斯科大公的家園，卻無功而返。
for Moscow was not visited by western men until a generation later.
直到一代人之后，西方人才首次造訪了莫斯科。
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
與此同時，一個名為巴貝羅的威尼斯人考察了西亞的古跡，并帶回有關一種神秘文字的報告。
which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay.
這種神秘的文字有的刻在伊朗謝拉茲地區許多廟宇的石壁上，更多的是刻在無數烘干的泥版上。
But Europe was busy with many other things
不過，此時的歐洲正忙于許多別的事情。
and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first "cuneiform inscriptions" (socalled because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called "Cuneus"in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr.
直到18世紀末，第一批"楔形文字"泥版（所以如此稱呼，是因為該文字的字母呈楔狀）才由一個叫尼布爾的丹麥勘測員帶回歐洲。
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.
極富耐心的德國教師格羅特芬德花了30年時間，破譯了前面的四個字母，分別是d，a，r及sh，合起來正是波斯國王大流士的名字。
