Ancient Civilizations

The ancient world is full of surprises. For a long time, historians assumed that early civilizations were simple, rough drafts of our own. But the more archaeologists dig, the clearer it becomes that ancient peoples were inventive, well organized and in closer contact with each other than anyone expected.

古代世界充满了意外。很长一段时间里，历史学家认为早期文明不过是我们这个文明简单而粗糙的雏形。但考古学家挖得越深，就越清楚地看到：古代的人们富有创造力，组织严密，而且彼此之间的联系远比人们预想的紧密。

They built cities on careful grid plans, moved goods across seas and deserts, and followed the sky with great accuracy. Some of their work still puzzles engineers today. Their stories make us rethink easy ideas about progress and about what it means to be civilized.

他们按照精心设计的网格规划建造城市，把货物运过大海和沙漠，并以很高的精度观测天空。他们的一些成就至今仍让工程师感到困惑。他们的故事促使我们重新思考关于进步、关于何为文明的那些想当然的观念。

Around 2500 BCE, while the Egyptians were building the pyramids at Giza and the cities of Mesopotamia were growing rich, a third great civilization was flourishing in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. Later historians knew almost nothing about it until excavations began in the 1920s. Today we call it the Indus Valley Civilization, and in some ways it was the most advanced urban society of its time.

大约公元前2500年，当埃及人在吉萨建造金字塔、美索不达米亚的城市日益富庶时，在今天的巴基斯坦和印度西北部，第三个伟大的文明正在兴盛。直到20世纪20年代开始发掘之前，后世的历史学家对它几乎一无所知。今天我们称之为印度河流域文明，从某些方面看，它是当时最先进的城市社会。

Its largest cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, were laid out on a grid, with main streets running north to south and east to west. Most houses had a bathroom connected to covered drains along the street, a level of public sanitation that Europe would not see until the Romans. Merchants used the same standard stone weights across a huge area, larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. And yet we still cannot read their writing. The Indus script, found on thousands of small seals and tablets, is one of the great unsolved puzzles of archaeology.

它最大的城市摩亨佐达罗和哈拉帕都按网格布局，主要街道呈南北和东西走向。大多数房屋都有浴室，与沿街的加盖排水沟相连。这样的公共卫生水平，欧洲要到罗马人的时代才能达到。商人们在一片广阔的地区使用同样的标准石制砝码，这片地区比埃及和美索不达米亚加起来还要大。然而，我们至今仍读不懂他们的文字。印度河文字见于数千枚小印章和小板上，至今仍是考古学中的一大未解之谜。

Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for more than 3,000 years. That is so long that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. Even so, there is a lot about Egypt that most people have never heard.

古埃及文明延续了3000多年。这段时间之长，以至于克娄巴特拉生活的年代离人类登月，比离大金字塔的建造还要近。尽管如此，关于埃及，仍有许多事是大多数人从未听说过的。

The pyramids were not built by slaves, as many films suggest. They were built by organized crews of workers, many of them skilled, who lived in a town next to the site at Giza. Bakeries and animal bones found there show that they ate bread, fish and plenty of meat and drank beer, and their skeletons show broken bones that had been set and healed. The crews gave themselves names like “Friends of Khufu” and “Drunkards of Menkaure,” which they painted on the stones. Records from a later village of tomb builders, Deir el-Medina, show that workers there could take days off when they were sick, or even after a scorpion sting.

金字塔并不像许多电影里演的那样由奴隶建造，而是由组织有序的工人队伍建成的，其中许多人是熟练工匠。他们住在吉萨工地旁的一个小镇里。在那里发现的面包坊和动物骨头表明，他们吃面包、鱼和大量的肉，还喝啤酒；他们的骨骼上可以看到骨折后经过接骨并已愈合的痕迹。这些工人队伍给自己起了“胡夫之友”“孟卡拉的醉汉”之类的名字，并把它们涂写在石块上。来自后来的陵墓工匠村落代尔麦地那的记录显示，那里的工人生病时，甚至被蝎子蜇了之后，都可以请假。

The Maya flourished for more than 2,000 years in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. Most people know them for their stone pyramids and for the abandonment of many of their great cities in the 9th century. But the Maya were also skilled astronomers and mathematicians.

玛雅文明在今天的墨西哥南部、危地马拉和伯利兹一带繁荣了2000多年。大多数人知道玛雅，是因为它的石砌金字塔，以及许多大城市在9世纪被废弃。但玛雅人同时也是出色的天文学家和数学家。

They developed the idea of zero on their own, many centuries before it reached Europe through Arabic mathematics. A Maya book known as the Dresden Codex contains tables that predicted eclipses and followed the movements of Venus over many years. Their Long Count calendar counted days from a starting point in 3114 BCE, and some inscriptions mention dates millions of years in the past. The Maya themselves never disappeared: about six million people speak Mayan languages today.

他们独立发展出了零的概念，比零经由阿拉伯数学传入欧洲早了许多个世纪。一部被称为《德累斯顿抄本》的玛雅书籍中有一些表格，可以预测日食和月食，并跟踪金星多年的运行。他们的长纪历从公元前3114年的一个起点开始计算天数，有些铭文甚至提到数百万年前的日期。玛雅人本身从未消失：今天仍有大约600万人讲玛雅语言。

Rome is the ancient civilization most familiar to Westerners, but its numbers are still impressive. Around 100 CE, the city had about a million people, and no European city was that large again until London around 1800. By the 3rd century, eleven aqueducts brought fresh water to Rome's fountains and public baths. The state handed out free grain to citizens, and a great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, carried waste into the Tiber. Parts of it still drain water today.

罗马是西方人最熟悉的古代文明，但它的各项数字至今仍令人惊叹。公元100年前后，这座城市约有100万人口，此后直到1800年前后的伦敦，欧洲才再次出现如此规模的城市。到3世纪时，11条引水渠把清水送到罗马的喷泉和公共浴场。国家向公民免费发放粮食，一条名为“马克西姆下水道”的大型下水道把污水排入台伯河。它的部分段落至今仍在排水。

Roman concrete, called opus caementicium, is one of the most durable building materials ever made. Roman harbor walls built 2,000 years ago still stand in the sea, taking the force of the waves. Scientists have found out why: seawater reacts with the volcanic ash in the mix and forms new crystals that make the concrete stronger over time. Modern concrete does the opposite and slowly breaks down in seawater. Engineers are now studying the Roman recipe to make longer-lasting, greener building materials.

罗马混凝土被称为opus caementicium，是人类制造过的最耐久的建筑材料之一。2000年前修建的罗马港口海墙至今仍屹立在海中，经受着海浪的冲击。科学家已经找到了原因：海水与混合料中的火山灰发生反应，生成新的晶体，使混凝土随着时间推移变得更加坚固。现代混凝土则恰恰相反，会在海水中慢慢损坏。如今，工程师们正在研究罗马的配方，希望造出更耐久、更环保的建筑材料。

The Inca Empire grew in western South America from the early 1400s until the Spanish conquest in 1533. It was the largest state in the Americas before Columbus, covering about 2 million square kilometers from southern Colombia to central Chile. A network of roads about 40,000 kilometers long held it together across deserts, forests and high mountains.

从15世纪初到1533年西班牙人征服为止，印加帝国在南美洲西部不断扩张。它是哥伦布到来之前美洲最大的国家，面积约200万平方公里，从哥伦比亚南部一直延伸到智利中部。一张长约4万公里的道路网，穿越沙漠、森林和高山，把整个帝国连为一体。

The Inca had no iron tools, did not use the wheel for transport and had no writing in the usual sense. Even so, they built stone walls high in the Andes whose blocks fit together so closely, without mortar, that a knife blade cannot slip between them. In Cusco, many of these walls have survived strong earthquakes that badly damaged later Spanish buildings. To keep records, the Inca used the quipu, a set of knotted strings that stored numbers and perhaps stories. Researchers can read the numbers, but much of the system is still a mystery.

印加人没有铁制工具，不用车轮运输，也没有通常意义上的文字。尽管如此，他们仍在安第斯山脉的高处砌起石墙，石块之间不用灰浆却严丝合缝，连刀刃都插不进去。在库斯科，许多这样的石墙经受住了强烈地震，而后来西班牙人修建的房屋却在地震中严重受损。为了记录信息，印加人使用奇普，这是一套打了结的绳子，用来记录数字，或许还有故事。研究人员能读懂其中的数字，但这套系统的大部分内容仍是个谜。

Modern archaeology keeps showing how connected the ancient world was. For a long time, scholars pictured early civilizations as islands, each developing on its own. The evidence now tells a different story.

现代考古学不断揭示，古代世界的联系有多么紧密。长期以来，学者们把早期文明想象成一座座孤岛，各自独立发展。如今，证据讲述了一个不同的故事。

Blue glass beads made in Egypt and Mesopotamia have been found in Bronze Age graves in Denmark, buried around 1400 BCE. Silk, probably from Asia, was identified in the hair of an Egyptian mummy from about 1000 BCE. Roman coins have turned up at Oc Eo, an ancient port in what is now southern Vietnam. Some researchers have even reported traces of tobacco and coca, plants from the Americas, in Egyptian mummies, but most scholars think those samples were contaminated. How goods traveled such distances is still being studied and debated.

在丹麦约公元前1400年的青铜时代墓葬中，发现了产自埃及和美索不达米亚的蓝色玻璃珠。在一具约公元前1000年的埃及木乃伊的头发中，检测出了很可能来自亚洲的丝绸。在今天越南南部的古港口奥埃奥（Óc Eo），出土了罗马钱币。一些研究人员甚至报告说在埃及木乃伊中发现了烟草和古柯的痕迹，这两种植物原产美洲，但大多数学者认为这些样本受到了污染。货物究竟如何跨越如此遥远的距离，至今仍在研究和争论之中。

On the Konya Plain in central Turkey lies Çatalhöyük, one of the oldest and largest Neolithic settlements in the world. People lived there from about 7100 BCE for well over a thousand years. At its peak, it was home to several thousand people, a huge number for its time.

在土耳其中部的科尼亚平原上，坐落着恰塔霍裕克，它是世界上最古老、规模最大的新石器时代聚落之一。从大约公元前7100年起，人们在这里生活了一千多年。在鼎盛时期，这里住着几千人，在当时是一个巨大的数字。

The settlement had no streets. Houses were built wall to wall, and people walked across the roofs and climbed down into their homes by ladder. Archaeologists have found very little sign of rich and poor: no palaces, no grand tombs, no wealthy neighborhoods. The dead were buried under the floors of the houses, and their bones show that men and women ate much the same food and lived very similar lives. People painted animals and hunting scenes on their walls, and some covered the skulls of their ancestors in plaster and kept them at home. Çatalhöyük shows that a large community could be organized very differently from most of the societies that came after it.

这个聚落没有街道。房屋一栋紧挨一栋，人们在屋顶上行走，再顺着梯子下到家中。考古学家几乎没有发现贫富分化的迹象：没有宫殿，没有豪华的墓葬，也没有富人区。死者被埋在房屋的地面下，他们的骨骼显示，男人和女人吃的食物几乎相同，生活方式也非常相似。居民在墙上画动物和狩猎场景，有些人还用灰泥覆盖祖先的头骨，把它们留在家中。恰塔霍裕克表明，一个大型社群的组织方式，可以与后来的大多数社会截然不同。

The more we learn about ancient civilizations, the harder it is to see human progress as a simple climb upward. Harappa had covered drains in its streets, which most European towns of the Middle Ages lacked. The Maya followed Venus and predicted eclipses for centuries. Parts of the Inca roads are still in use today, more than 500 years after they were built.

我们对古代文明了解得越多，就越难把人类的进步看成一条简单的上升直线。哈拉帕的街道上有加盖的排水沟，而中世纪欧洲的大多数城镇都没有。玛雅人几百年来一直观测金星并预测日月食。印加道路的一些路段至今仍在使用，距修建已有500多年。

These civilizations also show how fragile even great societies can be. Every one of them eventually declined or changed beyond recognition, often because of a mix of climate change, political conflict, war and damage to the land. Those problems are not limited to the past. Societies today face many of the same ones.

这些文明也让我们看到，即使是伟大的社会也可能多么脆弱。它们最终都衰落了，或者变得面目全非，原因往往是气候变化、政治冲突、战争和土地退化交织在一起。这些问题并不只属于过去。今天的社会也面临着其中的许多问题。

Ancient civilizations were not primitive. The people who built Mohenjo-daro, calculated eclipses in the forests of the Yucatán or cut roads through the Andes had the same brains and abilities that we have today. They were creative and ambitious, and like us, they could achieve great things or fail badly.

古代文明并不原始。建造摩亨佐达罗、在尤卡坦的森林里推算日食、在安第斯山脉中开辟道路的人们，拥有和今天的我们一样的大脑和能力。他们富有创造力，也满怀雄心；和我们一样，他们既能成就伟业，也可能惨遭失败。

Their tools were different from ours, but the hopes and needs that drove them were much the same. Studying them tells us where we come from, and it helps us see our own time more clearly.

他们的工具与我们的不同，但驱动他们的希望和需求却大体相同。研究他们，能告诉我们自己从哪里来，也能帮助我们更清楚地看待自己所处的时代。