Treasure hunt begins in England

Chapter 756 Analysis
Because the city has been operating for almost 4000 years in history.So naturally, in many cases, there will be a relic that has been used repeatedly by multiple civilizations before.

So for Liang En and the others, since Uruk knew about this place, except for a few golden dawns who ran to study the city walls, everyone else focused their attention on the various temples.

These temples in ancient times were not only religious places, but also cultural centers and depositors of wealth, so the most important kind of clay tablets with characters should also be found in this place.

Especially for these first urban dwellers of the world, they crystallized the early meaning hidden behind the vagueness of the ritual sites, statues, and ground plans of the sanctuary or temple.

For example, judging from the display of these ruins, the entire city in the early days when Uruk was built has demonstrated the superb ability of the organizers to communicate with the supernatural.

As old as it is, it has a level of ingenuity and complexity that few others in the world can match.Already the focal point of the early city, the temple grew in size and splendor.

People held sacrifices in these temples to ensure a good harvest, and over time, the rituals of later sacrifices became more complicated, and larger and grander temples were erected as far north as Assyria, 300 miles from the Tigris River. Far.

The cedar for its construction is said to have been brought from Lebanon and the copper from Anatolia.At that time, no other ancient society accorded such importance to religion, or devoted so many collective resources to maintaining it.

This shows that, compared with the Sumerian city-states such as Uruk and Ur, other ancient societies only regarded gods and religion as one of the important components of life, rather than allowing people's emotions to be so complete. dependent on the will of God.

In ancient times, Lower Mesopotamia was a flat land of mires, swamps and rivers.There are no mountains for the gods to live like people, but only the empty sky, and the relentless scorching sun and wind ravage the unprotected land;
Floods are irresistible forces, droughts bring devastating blight.Under the power of nature, human beings at that time could not compete at all, so it is no wonder why the Sumerians believed in gods so devoutly.

According to their legends, the gods live in such a natural environment, or live on a lonely "highland" in the plain, just like the brick and stone towers and ziggurats recorded in the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

The temples in Uruk were also built according to this shape, and according to their previous excavation experience, there are often ash pits near these buildings that are specially used to hide these clay tablets.

This may be because those Sumerians believed that writing was sacred, so these things with writing had to be stored near the same sacred temple.

Of course, not all the clay tablets are buried in this way today, and the other part is that the invaders found these clay tablets that were of little use to them and discarded them on the spot.

Considering that these clay tablets are definitely not light in weight, the invaders would definitely not move these heavy things to other places, so they would also bury them near the temple.

The facts were exactly as they had deduced before. In just three days, they successfully found several ash pits from several temple ruins and nearby.

No matter from which point of view, those things with engraved characters were very important to the ancient people, so even if they were really not needed, they would not throw them around, but chose to bury them centrally.

This really facilitated Liang En and his group's actions. At least except for a very few fragments of clay tablets that were mixed into the building debris for unknown reasons, they could easily obtain a large number of such important clay tablets at once.

And unlike the completely broken clay tablets before, although most of the clay tablets in these ash pits have been broken, many of them are intact.

Judging from the complete clay tablets, most of these records can now be divided into encyclopedias, such as the "Baigong Biao" which records more than 116 kinds of occupations, and the "Container Table" which lists [-] kinds of pottery.

There are even natural history books such as "Fish List", "Plant List", and "Bird List". From a certain perspective, the Sumerians basically recorded everything they knew after mastering the text.

In addition to these precious materials that record all aspects of that era, the most important record found in this round of searches comes from the Temple of Gilgamesh in the Babylonian era, which contains a complete set of "Epic of Gilgamesh".

Different from those epic clay tablets discovered before, these clay tablets come from the ninth century AD, which can be regarded as the earliest and most complete epic known now.

Unlike the "Epic of Gilgamesh", which is the most complete and only 2/3 of it has been found now, at least [-]% of the epic that Liang En and the others have found has been preserved completely, so that people can truly see what the epic looked like back then .
So after dinner that night, Liang En was selected by everyone to give a small speech on stage, the content of which was an epic about this new discovery.

I have to say that they are able to translate so fast now because Liang En has mastered a language equivalent to his mother tongue, so maybe someone else has to translate something for several months, and he only needs to look at it to understand the content.

Although it is said that in many movies, there will be an archaeologist who finds the cultural relics with ancient documents and can read them smoothly, but in fact this is just an artistic creation.

Because it is a very complicated task to study ancient texts clearly, most archaeologists do not have the skills to translate ancient languages.

Therefore, in the past, after archaeologists found important documents, they often needed to mail them to translation experts in ancient languages ​​for translation, so that they could proceed to the next step of research.

Although with the advancement of technology, people have more means of communication, but whether it is fax or the Internet, it only increases the speed of information transmission, and it still takes time to translate.

After all, these are some dead ancient texts, so for most professional scholars nowadays, the process of reading these things is closer to translating codes than real reading texts, and the speed is naturally not fast.

So from a certain point of view, the translation speed similar to Liang En's is indeed worthy of shocking these professionals. Fortunately, his previous deciphering of many dead characters showed his talent in language, so everyone didn't think there was anything wrong with it. wrong.

In addition, Liang En can speak Chinese, English, French and even Arabic at the level of his mother tongue, which also brings a lot of convenience to the next work.

At least for the vast majority of people, research using their mother tongue and research using other languages ​​are two different difficulties, so Liang En's current approach has greatly improved the research efficiency of their entire team.

Even during this period, Liang En specially wrote some introductions in Arabic for the things found this time at the request of the Iraqi side, so that they can be used by the museum in the future.

(End of this chapter)