翻译题
Civilizations Civilizations, vast or otherwise, can always be located on a map. An essential part of their character depends on the constraints or advantages of their geographical situation. 【T1】This, of course, will have been affected for centuries or even millennia by human effort. Every landscape bears the traces of this continuous and cumulative labour generation after generation contributing to the whole. So doing, humanity itself has been transformed by what the French historian Jules Michelet called 'the decisive shaping of self by self', or(as Karl Marx put it)'the production of people by people ' . To discuss civilization is to discuss space, land and its contours, climate, vegetation, animal species and natural or other advantages. It is also to discuss what humanity has made of these basic conditions: agriculture, stock-breeding, food, shelter, clothing, communications, industry and so on. 【T2】The stage on which humanity's endless dramas are played out partly determines their story-line and explains their nature. The cast will alter, but the set remain broadly the same. For the expert on India, Hermann Goetz, there are two essential Indias. One is humid, with heavy rainfall, lakes, marshes, forests and jungles, aquatic plants and flowers—the land of people with dark skins. It contrasts with the dryer India of the Indo-Gangetic plain, plus the Deccan plateau—the home of lighter-skinned people, many of them warlike. India as a whole, in Goetz's view, is a debate and a tug-of-war between these two contrasting areas and peoples. 【T3】The natural and man-made environment, of course, can not predetermine everything. It is not all-powerful. But it greatly affects the inherent or acquired advantages of any given situation. To take inherent advantages, every civilization is born of immediate opportunities, rapidly exploited. Thus in the dawn of time, river civilizations flourished in the old world: Chinese civilization along the Yellow River; pre-Indian along the Indus; Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian on the Euphrates and the Tigris Egyptian on the Nile. A Similar group of Vigorous civilizations developed in Northern Europe, around the Baltic and the North Sea—not to mention the Atlantic Ocean itself. Much of the West and its dependencies today, in fact, are grouped around that ocean, rather as Roman world of former times was grouped around the Mediterranean. 【T4】These classic instances reveal above all the prime important of communications. No civilization can survive without mobility; all are enriched by trade and the stimulating impact of strangers. Islam for instance, is inconceivable without the movement of its caravans across the 'dry seas' of its deserts and steppes, without its expeditions in the Mediterranean and across the Indian Ocean as far as Malacca and China. 【T5】Mentioning these achievements has already led us beyond the natural and immediate advantages which supposedly gave rise to civilizations. To overcome the steady winds of the Indian Ocean, or to dam a river—all that needed human effort, to enjoy advantages, or rather to create them.