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托福阅读材料推荐:埃及象形文字

2016-07-18 16:08:04来源：网络

　　14:17

　　My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. Here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "meen" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen," which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "aru meen," which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into "mey meen," which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere.

　　15:29

　　But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.

　　16:14

　　Why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. These are our ancestors -- yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. What would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out.

　　16:45

　　Thank you.

　　16:47

　　(Applause)

　　以上就是新东方在线托福网为你带来的托福阅读材料推荐:埃及象形文字，更多精彩敬请关注新东方在线托福网。

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