4　象形文字

埃及人發(fā)明了文字，從此開始了歷史有了記載

我們那些最早生活在歐洲茫茫荒野的祖先，飛快地學(xué)會(huì)了很多新事物。可以肯定地說(shuō)，在適當(dāng)?shù)臅r(shí)候，他們本可以拋棄野蠻人的生活方式，開創(chuàng)屬于自己的文明。但是突然間，他們與世隔絕的生活結(jié)束了，他們被發(fā)現(xiàn)了。

從南方一個(gè)不知名的地方來(lái)了一個(gè)旅行者，他勇敢地漂洋過(guò)海、翻山越嶺，發(fā)現(xiàn)了歐洲大陸的野蠻人。他來(lái)自非洲，家在埃及。

西方人還在夢(mèng)想著刀叉、車輪和房子時(shí)，尼羅河流域早在成千上萬(wàn)年前就已進(jìn)入高度文明。因此，他們把祖先請(qǐng)回洞中，參觀一下地中海的南岸和西岸，那里是人類的發(fā)源地。

埃及人教給他們很多東西。埃及人是優(yōu)秀的農(nóng)夫，精通灌溉。他們修建的廟宇后來(lái)被希臘人效仿，是最早的教堂造型，而我們今天仍在這種教堂里參拜。他們發(fā)明了一套歷法。它是一個(gè)計(jì)算時(shí)間的有用工具，經(jīng)過(guò)幾次修改，一直沿用至今。然而最重要的是，埃及人學(xué)會(huì)了如何保存語(yǔ)言，并造福于子孫——他們發(fā)明了文字。

measuring time that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented the art of writing.

We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines that we take it for granted that the world has always been able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most important of all inventions, is quite new.Without written documents we should be like cats and dogs, who can only teach their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who, because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can make use of the experience of those generations of cats and dogs that have gone before.

In the first century before our era, when the Romans came to Egypt, they found the valley full of strange little pictures which seemed to have something to do with the history of the country. But the Romans were not interested in “anything foreign” and did not inquire into the origin of these queer figures which covered the walls of the temples and the walls of the palaces and endless reams of flat sheets made out of the papyrus reed. The last of the Egyptian priests who had understood the holy art of making such pictures had died several years before.Egypt deprived of its independence had become a storehouse filled with important historical documents which no one could decipher and which were of no earthly use to either man or beast.

Seventeen centuries went by and Egypt remained a land of mystery. But in the year 1798 a French general by the name of Bonaparte happened to visit eastern Africa to prepare for an attack upon the British Indian Colonies. He did not get beyond the Nile, and his campaign was a failure. But, quite accidentally, the famous French expedition solved the problem of the ancient Egyptian picture-language.

One day a young French officer, much bored by the dreary life of his little fortress

對(duì)報(bào)刊、書籍和雜志，我們習(xí)以為常，想當(dāng)然地認(rèn)為世界本來(lái)就存在讀書寫字。事實(shí)上，文字這個(gè)最重要的發(fā)明，還是最近的事情。如果沒(méi)有文字資料，我們就會(huì)像貓狗一樣，只能教孩子幾件簡(jiǎn)單的事。由于不會(huì)寫，貓狗無(wú)法繼承和運(yùn)用它們前輩的經(jīng)驗(yàn)。

公元前1世紀(jì)，羅馬人來(lái)到歐洲時(shí)，發(fā)現(xiàn)河谷遍布一些奇怪的小圖畫，圖畫好像跟這個(gè)國(guó)家的歷史有關(guān)。寺廟和宮殿的墻上，以及大量由紙莎草造的紙上，畫滿了古怪的圖形。但是羅馬人對(duì)“外邦事物”并不感興趣，更沒(méi)有追尋這些圖形的起源。能看懂這種神圣繪畫藝術(shù)的最后一位牧師，幾年前已經(jīng)去世。喪失主權(quán)的埃及成了一個(gè)倉(cāng)庫(kù)，里面裝滿了重要的歷史文獻(xiàn)。但這些文獻(xiàn)沒(méi)人能破解，對(duì)人類和動(dòng)物也沒(méi)有直接的利用價(jià)值。

17個(gè)世紀(jì)過(guò)去了，埃及依然是一塊神秘的土地。但是在1798年，一位名叫波拿巴的法國(guó)將軍，碰巧來(lái)到東非，準(zhǔn)備攻打英國(guó)的殖民地——印度。可惜他沒(méi)能過(guò)尼羅河就戰(zhàn)敗了。但非常偶然地，這次著名的法國(guó)遠(yuǎn)征破解了古埃及象形文字的謎團(tuán)。

當(dāng)時(shí)，法軍在羅塞塔河邊（尼羅河的一個(gè)河口）建造了一座小堡壘。有一天，一位年輕的法國(guó)軍官厭倦了堡壘的沉悶生活，決定到尼羅河三角洲的廢墟里搜尋一番，以打發(fā)無(wú)聊的時(shí)光。看啊！他找到了一塊令他迷惑不解的石頭。和埃及所有其他東西一樣，這塊石頭上也畫滿了小圖形。但這是一塊特別的黑色玄武巖石碑，和

on the Rosetta river（a mouth of the Nile）decided to spend a few idle hours rummaging among the ruins of the Nile Delta. And behold!he found a stone which greatly puzzled him.Like everything else in Egypt it was covered with little figures. But this particular slab of black basalt was different from anything that had ever been discovered. It carried three inscriptions. One of these was in Greek. The Greek language was known.“All that is necessary,” so he reasoned, “is to compare the Greek text with the Egyptian figures, and they will at once tell their secrets.”

The plan sounded simple enough but it took more than twenty years to solve the riddle. In the year 1802 a French professor by the name of Champollion began to compare the Greek and the Egyptian texts of the famous Rosetta stone. In the year 1823 he announced that he had discovered the meaning of fourteen little figures. A short time later he died from overwork, but the main principles of Egyptian writing had become known. Today the story of the valley of the Nile is better known to us than the story of the Mississippi River. We possess a written record which covers four thousand years of chronicled history.

As the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics（the word means “sacred writing”）have played such a very great r?le in history，（a few of them in modified form have even found their way into our own alphabet，）you ought to know something about the ingenious system which was used fifty centuries ago to preserve the spoken word for the benefit of the coming generations.

Of course, you know what a sign language is. Every Indian story of our western plains has a chapter devoted to strange messages written in the form of little pictures which tell how many buffaloes were killed and how many hunters there were in a certain party. As a rule it is not difficult to understand the meaning of such messages.

Ancient Egyptian, however, was not a sign language. The clever people of the Nile

此前發(fā)現(xiàn)的東西都不相同。它上面有三處篆刻，有一種是希臘文。他懂希臘文，所以推斷：“只要比較希臘文字和古埃及象形文字，就能立刻解開其中的秘密。”

這個(gè)方案聽起來(lái)很簡(jiǎn)單，實(shí)際上卻花了20多年的時(shí)間才解開謎團(tuán)。1802年，一位名叫商博良的法國(guó)教授開始比較羅塞塔這塊著名石碑上的希臘和古埃及文字。1823年，他宣稱已經(jīng)破譯出14種小圖形的含意。不久，他因過(guò)度勞累而死，所幸古埃及文字的主要造字法已為世人知曉。今天，我們對(duì)尼羅河谷的了解，遠(yuǎn)勝于對(duì)密西西比河的了解。因?yàn)槲覀儞碛幸徊课墨I(xiàn)，里面囊括了尼羅河4000年的歷史。

由于古埃及的象形文字（意思是“神圣的文字”）在歷史上發(fā)揮了巨大的作用（其中幾個(gè)經(jīng)過(guò)一番修改，甚至能在我們的字母表里找到），因此你應(yīng)該對(duì)這個(gè)天才的體系有些了解。5000年前，人們用它來(lái)保存語(yǔ)言，并傳給子孫后代。

你當(dāng)然知道什么是符號(hào)語(yǔ)言。因?yàn)槲覀兾鞑科皆拿恳粋€(gè)印第安故事中都有專門的章節(jié)介紹用小圖形記錄的奇怪信息。這些信息會(huì)記錄殺死多少頭野牛，某個(gè)分隊(duì)有多少獵人。一般說(shuō)來(lái)，這些信息都不難理解。

然而，古埃及文字不是符號(hào)語(yǔ)言。聰明的尼羅河谷人民早就跨越了那個(gè)階段。他們圖片的含義遠(yuǎn)不只圖像本身。下面，我會(huì)盡力給你解釋。

假如你是商博良，正在查看一沓滿是象形文字的莎草紙，突然發(fā)現(xiàn)有一張圖片，上面畫著一個(gè)人拿著鋸子。你會(huì)說(shuō)：“好極了，圖片的意思當(dāng)然是一個(gè)農(nóng)夫出去砍樹。”然后，你又拿起另一張莎草紙，說(shuō)的是一位享年82歲的王后的故事。故

had passed beyond that stage long before. Their pictures meant a great deal more than the object which they represented, as I shall try to explain to you now.

Suppose that you were Champollion, and that you were examining a stack of papyrus sheets, all covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly you came across a picture of a man with a saw.“Very well,” you would say, “that means of course that a farmer went out to cut down a tree.” Then you take another papyrus. It tells the story of a queen who had died at the age of eighty-two. In the midst of a sentence appears the picture of the man with the saw.Queens of eighty-two do not handle saws. The picture therefore must mean something else. But what?

That is the riddle which the Frenchman finally solved. He discovered that the Egyptians were the first to use what we now call “phonetic writing”—a system of characters which reproduce the “sound”（or phone）of the spoken word and which make it possible for us to translate all our spoken words into a written form, with the help of only a few dots and dashes and pothooks.

Let us return for a moment to the little fellow with the saw. The word “saw” either means a certain tool which you will find in a carpenter’s shop, or it means the past tense of the verb “to see”.

This is what had happened to the word during the course of centuries. First of all it had meant only the particular tool which it represented. Then that meaning had been lost and it had become the past participle of a verb. After several hundred years, the Egyptians lost sight of both these meanings and the picture ① came to stand for a single letter, the letter S. A short sentence will show you what I mean.Here is a modern English sentence as it would have been written in hieroglyphics.②

The ③ either means one of these two round objects in your head, which allow you to

事的句子中間又有人拿著鋸子的圖片，而82歲的王后是不可能拿鋸子的。因此，這張圖片必定另有他意，但究竟是什么呢？

這個(gè)謎最終被這個(gè)法國(guó)人解開了。商博良發(fā)現(xiàn)，古埃及人最先使用了我們今天所謂的“語(yǔ)音文字”。這種文字體系再現(xiàn)了口語(yǔ)的“聲音”。借助這套系統(tǒng)，再加上一些點(diǎn)、橫、鉤，我們就能把口語(yǔ)轉(zhuǎn)化為文字形式。

讓我們?cè)倩剡^(guò)頭看一下手持鋸子的小人。“鋸”這個(gè)字的意思，可以是木匠店里的某種工具，也可以是“看”這個(gè)動(dòng)詞的過(guò)去式。

在數(shù)百年的歷程中，這個(gè)字發(fā)生了一些變化。起初，它只表示一種既定的、特別的工具。后來(lái)，原意消失了，變成一個(gè)動(dòng)詞的過(guò)去式。幾百年后，古埃及人又拋棄了這兩種意思，用這張圖片①表示一個(gè)字母，即字母S。通過(guò)一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的句子，你就能明白我的意思了。下面是一個(gè)現(xiàn)代英文句子，我們用象形文字來(lái)表示

為：②。

③可以表示你頭上的兩個(gè)圓東西，即眼睛；也可以表示“I”（我），即說(shuō)話的人。

see or it means “I”, the person who is talking.

A④ is either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents the verb “to be” which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part of a verb like “be-come” or “be-have”. In this particular instance it is followed by ⑤ which means a “l(fā)eaf” or “l(fā)eave” or “l(fā)ieve”（the sound of all three words is the same）.

The “eye” you know all about.

Finally you get the picture of a ⑥ It is a giraffe. It is part of the old sign-language out of which the hieroglyphics developed.

You can now read that sentence without much difficulty.

“I believe I saw a giraffe.”

Having invented this system the Egyptians developed it during thousands of years until they could write anything they wanted, and they used these “canned words” to send messages to friends, to keep business accounts and to keep a record of the history of their country, that future generations might benefit by the mistakes of the past.

④可以指采蜜的昆蟲，也可以指表“存在”的動(dòng)詞“be”。再者，它還可以是如“be-come”或“be-have”之類動(dòng)詞的前綴。在上面的例句中，接下來(lái)是圖⑤，意思是“葉子”（leaf），或者動(dòng)詞“l(fā)eave”“l(fā)ieve”（這三個(gè)單詞的英文發(fā)音是一樣的）。

然后又是“眼睛”（eye），你自然很清楚它的意思。

句子最后是圖⑥，畫了一只長(zhǎng)頸鹿。它是古老符號(hào)語(yǔ)言的一部分。象形文字正是從符號(hào)語(yǔ)言發(fā)展而來(lái)的。

你現(xiàn)在可以毫不費(fèi)力地讀懂那個(gè)句子了。

意思是“我想我看到了一只長(zhǎng)頸鹿。”（I believe I saw a giraffe.）

古埃及人自從發(fā)明了這個(gè)文字系統(tǒng)之后，幾千年來(lái)就不斷進(jìn)行完善，直到他們可以寫下想說(shuō)的任何事情。他們用這些“裝在框子里的字”給朋友傳遞信息、記賬、記載國(guó)史，以便后人吸取前人的教訓(xùn)，從中獲益。