[推荐感谢台湾康老师的分享] 阅读加试题苏美文明与埃及文明完整英文版解答

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It is an astonishing fact that human civilization should have emerged into the light of history in two separate places at just about the same time. Between 3500 and 3000 B.C. when Egypt was being united under pharaonic rule other great civilization arose in Mesopotamia the “land between the rivers.” And for close to three thousand years, the two rival centers retained their distinct characters, even though they had contact with each other from their earliest beginnings, and their destinies were interwoven in many ways. The pressure that forced the inhabitants of both regions to abandon the pattern of Neolithic village life may well have been the same. But the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, unlike that of the Nile, is not a narrow fertile strip protected by desert on either side. It resembles a wide, shallow trough with few natural defenses, crisscrossed by two great rivers and their tributaries, and is easily encroached upon from any direction.
Thus the facts of geography tended to discourage the idea of uniting the entire Mesopotamian area under a single head. Rulers who had this ambition did not appear, so far as we know, until about one thousand years after the beginning of Mesopotamian civilization, and they succeeded in carrying it out only for brief periods and at the cost of almost continuous warfare. As a consequence, the political history of ancient Mesopotamia has no underlying theme of the sort that divine kingship provides for Egypt. Local rivalries foreign incursions, the sudden upsurge and equally sudden collapse of military power– those are its substance. Against such a disturbed background, the continuity of cultural and artistic traditions seems all the more remarkable. This common heritage is very largely the creation of the founders of Mesopotamian Civilization, whom we call Sumerians after the region of Sumer, which they inhabited, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The origin of the Sumerians remains obscure. Their language is unrelated to any other known tongue. Sometimes before 4,000 B.C. they came to southern Mesopotamia, from Persia, and there, within the next thousand years, they founded a number of city-states and developed their distinctive form of writing in cuneiform (wedge-shaped) characters on clay tablets. ■Unfortunately, the tangible remains of Sumerian civilization are extremely scanty compared to those of ancient Egypt. ■Building stone being unavailable in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians used mud brick and wood, so that almost nothing is left of their architecture except the foundation. ■Nor did they share the Egyptians' concern with the hereafter, although some richly endowed tombs in the shape of vaulted chambers below ground from the early dynastic period have been found in the city of Ur. ■Our knowledge of Sumerian Civilization thus depends very largely on chance fragments brought to light by excavation, including vast numbers of inscribed clay tablets. Yet we have learned enough to form a general picture of this vigorous, inventive, and disciplined people.
Each Sumerian city-state had its own local god, who was regarded as its king and owner. It also had a human ruler, the steward of the divine sovereign, who led the people in serving the deity. The local god, in return, was expected to plead the cause of his subjects among his fellow deities who controlled the forces of nature such as wind and weather, water, fertility, and the heavenly bodies. Nor was the idea of divine ownership treated as a mere pious fiction. The god was quite literally believed to own not only the territory of the city-state but also the labor power of the population and its products. All these were subject to his commands, transmitted to the people by his human steward. The result was an economic system that has been dubbed “theocratic socialism”, a planned society whose administrative center was the temple. The temple controlled the pooling of labor and resources for communal enterprises, such as the building of dikes or irrigation ditches, and it collected and distributed a considerable part of the harvest. All this required the keeping of detailed written records. Hence, we need not be surprised to find that the texts of early Sumerian inscriptions deal very largely with economic and administrative rather than religious matters, although writing was a priestly privilege.

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