Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

Because this city has been operating for nearly 4000 years in history. So naturally, it often happens that a ruin has been used repeatedly by multiple civilizations before.

So for Liang En and the others, since they learned about Uruk, except for a few Golden Dawns who ran to study the city walls, everyone else has focused their attention on various temples.

In ancient times, these temples were not only religious places, but also cultural centers and storehouses of wealth, so the most important clay tablets with inscriptions should also be found here.

Especially for these, the world's first urban dwellers, they made explicit the meaning that had been hidden in the early days behind the vague ritual sites, statues, and floor plans of sanctuaries or temples.

For example, judging from the conditions displayed in these ruins, the entire city in the early days of Uruk's construction had already demonstrated the organizer's superb ability to communicate with the supernatural.

Despite its age, its sophistication and sophistication are matched by few anywhere else in the world. Temples had become the focus of early cities and grew increasingly larger and more splendid.

Sacrifice was held in these temples to ensure a good harvest, and as time went on the rituals became more complex, and larger and more magnificent temples were built as far north as Assyria, 300 miles from the Tigris River. Far.

It is said that the cedar used in its construction was brought from Lebanon and the copper from Anatolia. At that time, no other ancient society gave religion such an important status or devoted so many collective resources to maintaining it.

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

In ancient times, Lower Mesopotamia was a flat land of mire, swamps, and rivers. There are no mountains for gods to live like humans, there is only the open sky, and the merciless scorching sun and strong winds ravage the unprotected land;

Floods are irresistible forces, droughts bring devastating blight. Human beings at that time were simply unable to compete with the power of nature, so it is no wonder why the Sumerians believed in gods so devoutly.

According to their legends, gods live in such a natural environment, or on isolated highlands in the plains, just like the masonry towers and ziggurats recorded in the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

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

This may be because those Sumerians considered writing to be sacred, so these written objects had to be stored near equally sacred temples.

Of course, not all clay tablets were buried in this way today, and some of them were simply abandoned on site after the invaders found these clay tablets that did not have much use for them.

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

The fact was 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 any angle, those things with words engraved on them were very important to ancient people, so even if they were no longer needed, they would not throw them away everywhere, but chose to bury them centrally.

This indeed facilitated Liang En and his team's operations. At least except for a very small number of mud tablets that were mixed into the building debris for unknown reasons, they could easily obtain a large number of these important mud tablets at one time.

And unlike the previous mud tablets that were completely broken, although most of the mud 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 classified into encyclopedias, such as the Hundred Works Table which records more than a hundred occupations, and the Container Table which lists 116 types of pottery.

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

In addition to these valuable materials recording 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 the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Unlike those epic clay tablets discovered before, these clay tablets are from the ninth century AD and can be regarded as the earliest and most complete epic known today.

Unlike the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the most complete and only 2/3 has been found, the epic that Liang En and the others found now is at least 90% complete, allowing people to truly see what the epic looked like back then. .

So after dinner that night, Liang En was elected by everyone to come to the stage to give a small speech, the content of which was about this newly discovered epic.

It has to be said that they are able to translate so quickly now because Liang En has mastered this type of language at a native level, so he can understand the content at just one glance when someone else may have to translate something for several months.

Although many movies feature an archaeologist who can read relics with ancient documents smoothly after finding them, 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 documents that they thought were important, they often needed to send them by email to translation experts in ancient languages ​​for translation, so that they could proceed with further research.

Although with the advancement of technology, people have more ways to communicate, both fax and the Internet have only increased the speed of information transmission. Translation still takes time.

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

So from a certain point of view, Liang En's translation speed is indeed worthy of shocking these professionals. Fortunately, his previous deciphering of various dead characters has demonstrated his talent in language, so everyone did not think there was anything wrong with it. wrong.

In addition, Liang En can reach native level in Chinese, English, French and even Arabic, which also brings a lot of convenience to the subsequent work.

At least for most people, research using their mother tongue and research using other languages ​​are two levels of difficulty, so Liang En’s current approach has also greatly improved the research efficiency of their entire team.

Even during this period, Liang En also wrote some Arabic introductions to the things found this time at the request of the Iraqi side for future use in the museum.