托福阅读背景知识(183)：苏美尔文明

　　在2014年5月24日的托福阅读考试中有这样一道题：苏美尔文明。针对这道托福考题，新东方富亦聪老师来为大家普及一下关于苏美尔文明的背景知识，这样有助于考生在面对这类题目时方便作答，新东方富亦聪老师指出：苏美尔人(也译作苏默)，是历史上两河流域(底格里斯河和幼发拉底河中下游)早期的定居民族，他们所建立的苏美尔文明是整个美索不达米亚文明中最早，同时也是全世界最早产生的文明。

　　托福阅读真题再现：

　　苏美尔人的居住地土地贫瘠，但是每年的洪水泛滥留下了肥沃的淤泥用来耕作，由此产生了统治阶层。而统治阶层在管理时为了记录则导致了楔形文字的产生，后来文字应用到了社会生活中。

　　新东方老师解析：

　　苏美尔人(也译作苏默)，是历史上两河流域(底格里斯河和幼发拉底河中下游)早期的定居民族，他们所建立的苏美尔文明是整个美索不达米亚文明中最早，同时也是全世界最早产生的文明。苏美尔文明主要位于美索不达米亚的南部，通过放射性碳十四的断代测试，表明苏美尔文明的开端可以追溯至公元前4000年。约结束在公元前2000年，被闪米特人(闪族人)建立的巴比伦所代替。这里发现的含有楔形文字前文字的最古老的石板(这是目前公认的最早的文字记录)可以被定期为约前36世纪。

　　托福阅读相关背景：

　　Sumerian Agriculture and hunting

　　The Sumerians adopted an agricultural mode of life as by perhaps as early as c. 5000 - 4500 BC the region demonstrated a number of core agricultural techniques, including organized irrigation, large-scale intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping involving the use of plough agriculture, and the use of an agriculturalspecialized labour force under bureaucratic control. The necessity to manage temple accounts with this organization led to the development of writing (c. 3500 BC).

　　From the royal tombs of Ur, made of lapis lazuli and shell, shows peacetime

　　In the early Sumerian Uruk period, the primitive pictograms suggest that sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs were domesticated. They used oxen as their primary beasts of burden and donkeys or equids as their primary transport animal and "woollen clothing as well as rugs were made from the wool or hair of the animals. ... By the side of the house was an enclosed garden planted with trees and other plants; wheat and probably other cereals were sown in the fields, and the shaduf was already employed for the purpose of irrigation. Plants were also grown in pots or vases."

　　An account of barley rations issued monthly to adults and children written in cuneiformon clay tablet, written in year 4 of King Urukagina, circa 2350 BC

　　The Sumerians practiced similar irrigation techniques as those used in Egypt. American anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams says that irrigation development was associated with urbanization, and that 89% of the population lived in the cities.

　　They grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, wheat, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks and mustard. Sumerians caught many fish and hunted fowl and gazelle.

　　Sumerian agriculture depended heavily on irrigation. The irrigation was accomplished by the use of shaduf, canals, channels,dykes, weirs, and reservoirs. The frequent violent floods of the Tigris, and less so, of the Euphrates, meant that canals required frequent repair and continual removal of silt, and survey markers and boundary stones needed to be continually replaced. The government required individuals to work on the canals in a corvee, although the rich were able to exempt themselves.

　　As is known from the "Sumerian Farmer's Almanac", after the flood season and after the Spring Equinox and the Akitu or New Year Festival, using the canals, farmers would flood their fields and then drain the water. Next they let oxen stomp the ground and kill weeds. They then dragged the fields with pickaxes. After drying, they plowed, harrowed, and raked the ground three times, and pulverized it with a mattock, before planting seed. Unfortunately the high evaporation rate resulted in a gradual increase in the salinity of the fields. By the Ur III period, farmers had switched from wheat to the more salt-tolerant barley as their principal crop.

　　Sumerians harvested during the spring in three-person teams consisting of a reaper, a binder, and a sheaf handler. The farmers would use threshing wagons, driven by oxen, to separate the cereal heads from the stalks and then use threshing sleds to disengage the grain. They then winnowed the grain/chaff mixture.

　　Language and writing

　　Main articles: Sumerian language and Cuneiform

　　Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer, 3100-3000 BC

　　The most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number of tablets written in cuneiform. Sumerian writing is the oldest example of writing on earth. Although pictures - that is, hieroglyphs - were first used, symbols were later made to represent syllables. Triangular or wedge-shaped reeds were used to write on moist clay. A large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language have survived, such as personal or business letters, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns, prayers, stories, daily records, and even libraries full of clay tablets. Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects like statues or bricks are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes-in-training. Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia long after Semitic speakers had become dominant.

　　The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian, by contrast, belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language groups. It is an agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes ("units of meaning") are added together to create words, unlike analytic languages where morphemes are purely added together to create sentences.

　　Understanding Sumerian texts today can be problematic even for experts. Most difficult are the earliest texts, which in many cases do not give the full grammatical structure of the language.

　　During the 3rd millennium BC a cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influences between Sumerian on Akkadian are evident in all areas including lexical borrowing on a massive scale--and syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This mutual influence has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian of the 3rd millennium BC as asprachbund.

　　Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC, but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Babylonia and Assyria until the 1st century AD.