托福阅读经典加试(苏美尔文化达尔文).doc

1 苏美尔文明 Sumerian Civilization 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 Pharaohic rule, another great civilization arose in Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers”. And for close to 3000 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 pressures 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 through 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 a thousand years after the beginnings 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 – these 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 Sumeria