08 THE SUMERIANS

苏曼利亚人

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

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.

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first “cuneiform inscriptions” (scalled 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 th famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

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:

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 inthis way which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from into and a fish changed from into . The sun was originally a plain circle and became If we were using

the Sumerian script today we would make an look like 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.

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.

TOWER OF BABEL（巴别塔）

NINEVEH（尼尼微城）

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

THE HOLY CITY OF BABYLON

（巴比伦的圣城）

“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. 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.

中文阅读

苏曼利亚的用钉子写字（Nail-writing）的泥板告诉我们融会西米族的亚西利亚与巴比伦的历史

十五世纪是一个大发见的世纪。哥仑布欲寻一条通震旦岛的路，不想撞见一个意外的新大陆。一位奥地利的僧正要作东方的旅行，并且要探访莫斯科微公爵的家，但是他的旅行完全失败了，一直到一代之后，莫斯科才有西方人的足迹。同时一个威尼斯人巴贝洛探寻西亚细亚的古迹，看见刻在西拉施庙的石上与无数焙干的泥板上的许多怪字，就带回不少关于这个奇怪文字的报告。

但是欧洲人正忙着许多别的事情，所以这最早的“楔形字”（cuneiform inscriptions）直到十八世纪之末，才被一位丹麦的测量家，尼布尔带到欧洲。三十年之后，一位富有耐性的德国学校教师格罗得芬特才认出最先的四个D. A. R. SH.；这四个字就是波斯王达理阿的名字。又过二十年，那位发见著名的贝希斯顿文字的英国军官亨利·劳林生给了我们一个辨认楔形字的有用的钥匙。

一比那解释楔形字的问题，当初祥普亮之解释埃及字容易多了。埃及人是用画的。但是美索博达米亚最早的居民，苏曼利亚人，想出在泥板上划字的方法，从画里演化出一种与画很少关系的V形图，将画完全废弃。下面有几个例子，可以指示你。起初用钉子在砖上划一个“星”如右图：

这个符号太累赘，不久又把天的意义加在星上，将上图简单化成这样子：

其实这样更使人模糊。同样的将牛字由变为，鱼字由变为，太阳本来是一个很简单的圆圈，后来变成。假使我们现在仍用苏曼利亚人的写字方法，我们会把画成样子。用如此方法来记下我们的思想，未免太复杂。但是苏曼利亚人、巴比伦人、亚西利亚人与波斯人以及所有迁居到这富饶的流域来的各种人，用这方法竟有三千余年之久。

美索博达米亚民族的历史是一部无尽期的战争与凯旋的记载。第一是从北方来的苏曼利亚人。他们是山居的白种人，一向敬奉山上的神。后来他们移入平原，便以人工建造许多小山，在山顶上筑起祭台。他们不知道怎样砌台阶，就在塔的周围筑出上升的走廊。我们现在的大车站，从这层到那层的上升的走廊乃是我们的工程师从苏曼利亚那边学来的。我们也许从他们还学到许多别的方法咧，这可不得而知了。苏曼利亚人完全被外来的民族并吞了。但是他们的塔仍然耸立在美索博达米亚的废址中。后来犹太人出奔巴比伦，看见这些塔，称之为巴别塔。

苏曼利亚人在纪元前四千年迁入美索博达米亚。不久他们就被阿甲第安人所征服。阿甲第安族是从阿拉伯沙漠来的说同样方言的西米族诸部落中之一。他们都称为“西米族”，因为从前的人相信他们是挪亚的三子中的西姆的嫡系子孙。一千年后，阿甲第安人又屈服于沙漠上西米族的另一部落，亚玛力人的治理之下。亚玛力人的有名的汉摩拉比王，在巴比伦圣城内造起一座极大的王宫，给人民订定许多法律，遂使巴比伦成为古代治理最好的国家。其次赫旦支族（你亦可在《旧约》里看见他们）又来蹂躏这富饶的流域，并且毁尽凡是他们不能带走的东西。以后轮到赫旦支族被那些信奉沙漠上的阿休神的人征服了；这些人自称为亚西利亚人，将尼尼微城作他们的强大帝国的中心。亚西利亚帝国征服了西亚细亚与埃及的全地，征收了无数臣服的民族的赋税，一直到基督降生前第七世纪之末。此时，西米族的又一部落，卡尔地亚人重新建造巴比伦为当时最重要的都城。他们的最著名的尼布甲尼撤王奖励人民研究科学，我们近代的天文与数学的知识，都是根据于卡尔地亚人所发明的几个最初的原理。在纪元前五三八年，一个残暴的波斯的游牧部落来侵扰这个古国，推翻了卡尔地亚帝国。但二百年后，他们又被亚历山大王征服了。这个富饶的流域，做过无数西米族的大熔炉的，遂变为希腊的藩属。以后，又来了罗马人，罗马人之后又来了土耳其人。这时世界文明第二中心的美索博达米亚，已变成一片广大无边的荒野，只剩了许多的大土丘告诉我们它的古代光荣的历史。