填空题 It has taken many a pick and shovel to prove to the unbelieving world that the history of Greece went back long before the year 776 B. C., the year with which historians used to begin it. But with Egypt the case has been different. The magic spades of archaeology have given us the whole lost world of Egypt. We know more about the vanished Egyptians than we know about the early Greeks and Romans, whose civilization died just yesterday. We know nearly everything there is to know. And one of the reasons is climate.
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For nearly fifty centuries the Egyptians kept depositing in the all-preserving soil everything their great civilization produced—food, dishes, clothing, furniture, jewelry, statues, ornaments, book—together with the bodies of their dead. Is it any wonder that we have a complete record of their civilization? It has been estimated that in those 4,700 years, something like 731,000,000 persons received burial, each with all the trappings his family could afford. Egypt is one vast cemetery out of which have come the richest treasures ever found by man. Even today, when so much has already been found, you may put your spade in any virgin soil and have a good chance of bringing something to light.
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The discovery which caused all his excitement was made in the year 1799 by one of Napoleon"s soldiers. He was digging a trench when his spade struck something hard. He dug carefully all around the object and pulled it out. It was a flat stone, about the size of a sheet of an opened newspaper, and had curious writing on it. He wiped it off, but he could not make head or tail of the writing. However, he could recognize that some of the characters were like the mysterious symbols inscribed on the obelisks and tombs. The soldier decided it was something important. He had no idea that before his eyes was one of the greatest treasures ever found by man.
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There seemed to be no getting at the hieroglyphics. Snakes, geese, lions, heads, owls, hawks, beetles, bees, fish, palm leaves, lotus flowers, people squatting on their haunches, people with their hands raised over their heads, triangles, half-moons, knots, loops—not one of them could be made out. One scholar after another had been obliged to come to the conclusion that he was beaten. There was just one way of solving the riddle—they must get hold of something written in both hieroglyphics and a language already known, and compare the two.
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Getting to the bottom of the hieroglyphics was a much harder job than any of them had anticipated, however. One after another was forced to give up in despair. But the French scholar Jean Francois Champollion refused to be defeated. Stubbornly he stuck to the task he had set for himself.
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He little knew that he was only at the beginning of his difficulties. The Egyptians had used letters only for writing names. Other words they had written in various ways. Some signs stood for whole words, some for syllables, some for letters. The only path open to Champollion was to keep on working with names, and this he did, searching the monuments for cartouches, as the little frames were called. It was slow, slow work, and twenty-three years after the Rosetta Stone was found, he had worked out only one hundred and eleven of the thousands of symbols. But it was a beginning, and already the mystery of Egypt was giving way before it. Victory over the whole was just a question of time.
A. Before Napoleon wend down to Egypt for his campaign, he made plans to study the country as no one else had done, because he had been so impressed with its monuments. Along with his army, he arranged to bring to Egypt a number of scholars whose business would be to tell the world about the wonders of the land. And then came a discovery which raised excitement to a pitch and sent thousands of curiosity seekers scurrying to Egypt.
B. And now, here was the Rosetta Stone, answering the description exactly, a priestly decree written in Greek, in hieroglyphics, and in ancient Egyptian business script! The scholars were filled with joy, and, when in 1801 the stone was ceded to England and placed in the British Museum, they fell to work on the inscription immediately.
C. Egypt is the archaeologist"s paradise—dig and you shall find. In Egypt, almost nothing rots, nothing spoils, nothing crumbles away. Dig up the most delicate carving, the finest substance, and you will find it fresh and perfect after thousands of years of lying in the sand, as though it had just come from the artist"s hand. The dry, desert soil keeps everything forever.
D. This stone—which we call the Rosetta Stone because it was found near the Rosetta arm of the Nile—was the magic key for which scholars had been sighing for centuries. Nothing had intrigued them like the hieroglyphics. If they could only get to the bottom of those curious symbols, the curtain of time would roll back and they would be able to read all the forgotten history of Egyptians, learn all the manners and customs and thoughts of that once mighty people. But though they had puzzled and puzzled till they were weary, they seemed no nearer the solution than when they began.
E. The oldest stone buildings in the world are the pyramids. They have stood for nearly 5,000 years and it seems likely that they will continue to stand for thousands of years. There are over eighty of them scattered along the banks of Nile.
F. He employed the method of working through proper names. Some of the signs on the Rosetta Stone were set off in a little frame. When he looked at the corresponding place in the Greek inscription, he saw written there the name of a pharaoh—Ptolemy. The natural thing to conclude was that in the Egyptian writing, the word in the frame was likewise Ptolemy. The signs, he decided, stood for letters.