One day in 1872. British museum. George Smith, the museum's caretaker, jumped on the ground in excitement, and the people present were amazed – what a good person to jump! But Smith didn't stop, and even took off his coat in excitement. What's wrong? It turned out that Smith had deciphered a passage of text that read:
"Tear down the houses and build the boats!" Throw away property and save your life. Bring all the living creatures and seeds on board! A great flood is coming, and the rain will connect the sky and the land. ”
Originally a cuneiform script, this passage was created by the Sumerians and is the oldest known script. Around 3400 BC, the prototype of cuneiform script was produced, mostly images. Around 3000 BC, the cuneiform system matured and the glyphs were simplified and abstracted. Smith deciphered records from cuneiform scripts, and in the museum where he worked, there were many stone tablets inscribed with this text. They come from the Mesopotamian plains of Iraq, more than 130,000 pieces, and record the civilization of the ancient Sumerians.
The first to discover this script was an Italian named Pablo, who, in 1472, during his travels in ancient Persia, which is today's Iran, saw these strange writings on the dilapidated walls of some ancient temples near Shiraz—the fonts almost all had triangular pointed heads, much like nails in appearance, and also like wooden wedges for sharpening, some lying horizontally, some pointing up or down, and some lying obliquely, looking like a sharp fingernail carved. Pablo was not fully aware that they were written at the time, but simply brought them back to Italy, which he wanted to arouse interest in West Asia, but no one responded, and what he did was quickly forgotten.
About 100 years later, another Italian man visited Shiraz, whose name was Valle. Not only did he copy the font from the ruins, but he also found it carved on clay tablets in ancient sites in present-day Iraq. Therefore, he concluded that it must be the writing of the ancient West Asians. He brought his findings back to Europe and gave Europeans the first knowledge of such a strange script. Over the next two hundred years, through archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia and the successful translation of a large number of clay tablets by linguists, it was finally known that cuneiform is the oldest known script in the world.
Regarding the cracking of "cuneiform", it is best mentioned that Henry-Rollinson, known as the "father of cuneiform".
Rawlinson (1810–1895), British officer and orientalist, made important contributions to the deciphering of babylonian, Persian, and Elamn cuneiform scripts. In 1833, he went to Iran and became interested in Persian monuments, and in 1835 he discovered the cuneiform inscription of Behestown in the Sizagros Mountains of Iran.
The Behestown inscription is inscribed in three different languages: Old Persian, Elamite and cuneiform script of Akkadian. The same article was written in all three languages and was written in 522 BC during the reign of the Persian king Darius I. It mainly records the historical events between the death of Cambyses II and the reunification of the empire by Darius I, including the coup d'état of Gomeda, the suppression of the revolt of Darius, and the expedition of Darius.
After more than two years of comparative research, Rawlinson found that the Akkadian cuneiform had some odd characteristics: a symbol had more than two syllable values, and many symbols had both ideographic and tabular notes. Rawlinson believed that the Akkadian cuneiform should belong to the Symic language family of the Arabic family, and published pronunciations and translations of the Akkadian "cuneiform" and syllable values and semantics of 246 symbols in 1851.
In this way, the cuneiform script is basically deciphered. In 1857, in order to confirm the scientific and reliability of these deciphered cuneiform scripts, the Royal Asian Society sent an inscription that had just been excavated and no one interpreted it, and sent it to Rawlinson, Opole, Hincks, and Talelbott, and found that their translations were basically the same, and since then the emerging discipline of cuneiform deciphering has been formally established.
Around 1870, George Smith, out of his love of ancient civilizations, began to teach himself cuneiform, spending two years of lunch studying cuneiform and deciding to translate the cuneiform script on the inscriptions of the British Museum. That's where the excitement of him jumping on the ground and taking off his coat comes from —just think, in Western countries, if someone says they've found a record board of the Great Flood that says about God's Great Flood — news like this would certainly be a sensation! Smith thus became not only an expert in cuneiform writing, but also a scholar known for the Great Flood.
After finding the cuneiform "record board," Smith published The Chaldean Book of Genesis in 1876, carefully comparing the cuneiform clay tablet's account of the flood and the similarities and differences in Genesis. "The value of the written plates describing the Flood is that they constitute an independent piece of evidence consistent with the biblical narrative, and much earlier than any other," he said. ”
"Tear down the houses and build the boats!" Throw away property and save your life. Bring all the living creatures and seeds on board! A great flood is coming, and the rain will connect the sky and the land. "Is there really a Great Flood on Earth? Did people rush to the legendary Noah's Ark to save their lives? Smith's discovery quickly caused controversy, with the core issue being that the record does not tell the truth of the prehistoric flood story, because the record can also be a legend. Historians cannot find more corroboration in later archaeology. Therefore, whether the Great Flood and Noah's Ark really exist has become a mystery of the world that many historians want to explore.
Fast forward to 2010, a group of Turks and Chinese Hong Kongers announced in Beijing on April 28 that they had found the remains of Noah's Ark in MountArarat Turkey (Mount Ararat), claiming that Noah's Ark would eventually stop at a snow-capped mountain at an altitude of 4,000 meters. Claim: After an identification of the wreckage of the hull, they determined that the wreckage was very consistent with the biblical appearance of Noah's Ark, and not only that, they also found a large number of pottery and living objects in the ruins, and even plant seeds.
However, this did not arouse people's "enough attention", or did not cause "imaginary sensation". To this end, a British scholar gave this "reasonable explanation": for the Great Flood people added many mythical colors, which also made it (the Great Flood) into a legend that modern people do not want to believe. Others think so: After all, the Flood was a global catastrophe, and the reason people only want to admit that it is a legend rather than a history is because they are unwilling to face the pain of "memory" directly. (Text/Lu Sheng)