Treasure hunt begins in England

Chapter 754 Clay Tablets
I have to say that they were lucky this time. After only reading the three cargo lists, he found that the fourth clay tablet he found was an important clay tablet.

"What's written on it?" Seeing Liang En staring at the screen, Joan asked curiously. "Is this thing very important now?"

"It's very important, because the record above is a legend." After quickly translating the words on the clay tablet, Liang En explained to Joan of Arc, "a legend about the origin of this city."

There are two protagonists in the whole legend, one is the aforementioned Inanna, that is, Ishtar, and the other is Enki, the water god from the Sumerian era to the Babylonian era.

Unlike Ishtar, who appears in many current TV, movies, anime and games, Enki is basically not well-known among ordinary people today, but in fact his status in history is not low.

According to Sumerian legend.The main god Enlil felt that human beings were too noisy, so he sent floods, droughts and plagues to destroy them.However, Enki taught Atrahashi the knowledge of irrigation, storage of grain, and medicine, so that human beings survived.

Enlil was very angry, and decided to secretly summon several gods to release a huge flood to completely wipe out human beings, but Enki still knew about it, and arranged for Utana Pizm to take refuge in a boat in advance.

After the great flood, he gave Utana Pizm the ability of immortality and asked him to live in seclusion in the mountains.This incident enraged Enlil, who accused Enki of obstructing his plans.

Enki explained to him that for the necessary balance, innocent humans should not be completely exterminated, and the remaining humans should be sterilized.

However, relatively, if human beings do not believe in gods and fall, they can let the gods slaughter them.Apparently, this is the earliest version of a similar story about Noah's Ark.

What's more, modern archaeological discoveries and linguistics show that Enki's Akkadian name Eya was called lahu in Semitic Sizhi (Canaanite) mythology and was probably later spelled Yahweh.

Therefore, many images and legends of Enki entered Judaism, and then gradually entered early Christianity, such as the prototype of the famous Noah's Ark story.

The story described on the clay tablet that Liang En is looking at now is a very long hymn related to these two gods, describing the story between the two gods.

According to the content of the poem, Enki is the god who lived in Eridu, the first city of the Sumerians and one of the five cities before the great flood.

And Ishtar is the embodiment of civilization and also the patron saint of Uruk. She went from Uruk to Eridu to meet Enki, the father god, and wanted to obtain the secrets kept by him.

The secret here is written as Me in the language at that time, which represents the power of holiness and civilization, including various skills and kingship. One of Enki's jobs is to guard this treasure.

Ishtar's purpose in doing this is also very simple, that is to make the city-state she protects prosperous.Enki got drunk at the banquet and was so smitten by Inanna that he let her take the secret away.

Inanna put the secret on the boat and hurriedly set sail. Enki sobered up and sent his god Abgallu (Abgallu, Ab = abyss gal = big lu = person) to take a boat to search for the trace of Inanna along the Euphrates River. .

There were seven stations from Eridu to Uruk, and there were fierce battles at each station, but Inanna finally transported the secret to Uruk.From then on, Enki lost his secret forever, and Inanna became the representative of civilization.

From a historical point of view, this is actually a metaphorical record using mythology, which represents the transfer of Sumerian kingship from the oldest Eridu to Uruk further north.

However, this story is not just a record of a period of history, at least from the point of view of the choice of words and sentences, it should be a hymn sung when offering sacrifices to the gods.

"Could it be—" Seeing this, Liang En had a guess, but in order to ensure that his guess was correct, he immediately contacted the Huaxia Archaeological Team with the walkie-talkie.

"What else did you find this time besides these fragments of clay tablets?" After a brief greeting, Liang En asked Professor Wang opposite.

"Indeed, other than some fragments of clay tablets were found in that ash pit." After hearing Liang En's question, Professor Wang replied immediately.

"The most important discovery is several cylinder seals mixed in those broken clay tablets, but because there are no words on them, only some patterns of crops and animals, so I didn't mention them because I thought they were not important."

Cylinder seals can be regarded as a specialty of Sumer. , Unlike flat printing in other civilizations, the Sumerians used a cylinder seal to leave an imprint on the inkpad by rolling instead of pressing.

In Mesopotamia, seals may have originated from decorative objects such as amulets in prehistoric times.This kind of amulet is usually engraved with a simple linear pattern, and in people's daily life at that time, it had the dual role of amulet to pray for blessings and avoid misfortune, and ornament decoration.

According to the archaeological excavations of scholars in the Mesopotamia, the earliest seals are several small round stones in the early [-]th millennium BC, engraved with dots, rings and crossed lines, and some have prominent perforations handle.

Judging from the imprints of the remaining rolling clay tablets, the cylinder seal was first used by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in the southern Mesopotamia and the Elamites in southwestern Iran as early as 4000 BC. Spread to other areas of Mesopotamia.

Even, in the Thoth near Thebes in Egypt and the Mycenaean cultural layer in ancient Greece, there are also varying numbers of lapis lazuli scroll seals, which shows that the use of cylinder seals has expanded beyond the Mesopotamia to other areas .

For example, during the follow-up investigation of the sites around Crete and the ancient city of Mycenae discovered by Liang En, the archaeological team discovered several such seals.

It’s just that as the clay tablets were gradually replaced by the papyrus invented in Egypt, these cylindrical seals gradually withdrew from the stage of history, but for this reason, this thing also became a representative of Sumerian civilization.

There are also many contents on these cylindrical seals, but from an archaeological point of view, these cylindrical seals as personal identification are actually of little value, so it is normal that Professor Wang did not take them just now.

But for Liang En now, he just needs to be sure that such a thing exists, and he doesn't need to know the contents clearly.

"What did you discover this time?" After Liang En ended the call, Joan looked at him who was operating the computer and asked curiously. "Is it an important discovery?"

"Yes, but I need more examples before that." Liang En sent a vocabulary composed of cuneiform characters into the system while speaking. "If I can find one or two more examples, it will show where this is."

As he spoke, Liang En entered the word and hit the Enter key. Soon, the computer selected four clay tablets from the ones that had been sorted out just now.

The word appeared on all four tablets, and after a brief inspection, he found that the four documents contained both official and commercial records.

Although these records seemed very routine, Liang En quickly found some interesting things from them after simple analysis and extraction of the above information.

(End of this chapter)