Chapter 993 The destination of words
Whether it is the discovery of a large number of gold treasures or the international recognition of Erlitou culture, it is something worth being excited about, so the banquet prepared by the Chinese archaeological team that night can be said to be extremely sumptuous.
Although traditional Sichuan cuisine is not mainly spicy, today Sichuan cuisine has broken the traditional barrier and begun to integrate. So even if it is mainly official cuisine, the Sichuan cuisine here also incorporates many modern styles, such as There are many spicy dishes.
"It's very good. I haven't eaten such good food since I left the capital of Shu last time." Joan of Arc spoke highly of this banquet. In other words, he likes any dish with a lot of spices, let alone any dish with a lot of spices. This tastes good to me.
"Of course, this is a chef who came from the capital of Shu. The store he opened in Istanbul always has a long queue at the door, and there are also a group of celebrities who are willing to visit the restaurant."
Professor Liu said with some pride that he naturally knew the identity of Joan of Arc, so he was very happy that the future Duke liked the delicacies of his country.
Because it has been a while since she came to this world, Joan of Arc is no longer in her original state where she just likes it as long as there are enough spices.
Although Joan of Arc still has an extraordinary love for all kinds of spices, she is now starting to pay attention to things other than spices.
And this chef just fits the current Joan of Arc's taste. The food he cooks is delicious enough from any angle, allowing people to enjoy the beautiful side of the food.
At the same time, the environment for eating was also very good. Because the temporary mobile houses were too small, they simply ate in the backyard outside the room.
But this is just the opposite. Compared with the somewhat cramped room, the backyard where you can see the stars when you look up and the sea and hills when you turn your head is obviously more suitable for everyone to celebrate and have dinner together.
Maybe because of the food and the environment, everyone seemed very relaxed, so except for starting to talk about some serious topics, everyone spent most of the banquet talking about lighter things.
Of course, there were some jokes in these light-hearted contents, but due to the surrounding environment, everyone quickly changed the topic to history.
"There is a very important question now, and that is why no writing was found in this place." Professor Liu said the most important question discovered during this exploration, and the question that felt most wrong.
To be honest, if this was just an ordinary village ruins, then it would be normal to not find any documentation.
Because that kind of self-sufficient closed society has very little movement of people, wealth or other things, so simply relying on people's memories is enough.
But it would be strange if a central city like Troy did not have any documentary records, because this type of city management has far exceeded the scope of direct human jurisdiction, so it must have records before it can be governed.
The most important thing is that Troy was not alone in his era. Both the Hittites in the east and Crete in the west had a large number of civilizations and mature texts, so they had enough content to learn from.
"I think there are two possibilities. Either there was writing before, but it was completely destroyed by people consciously." Liang En thought for a while and came up with his first guess.
"For example, this is the case with the ancient Mayan writing and some writing on small islands in Africa and the Pacific. The colonists systematically destroyed the local civilization and also destroyed the writing as the carrier of civilization."
"This is unlikely, because to destroy a kind of writing requires long-term and large-scale efforts. As for the enemies of Troy, they just came to rob and leave after robbing. They simply don't have that much time and energy to do it. this matter."
After hearing Liang En's first conjecture, Professor Liu shook his head and denied it. Because his conjecture was inconsistent with the known facts, he could basically judge that this conjecture was wrong.
"And in the early days of mankind, neither national consciousness nor religious consciousness was as strong as it was in later eras, so there was no need to adopt this method to change culture."
"What you said makes sense." Liang En nodded and approved Professor Liu's statement, because these two reasons are very reasonable and have been repeatedly confirmed all over the world.
To give a simple example, people have excavated the graves of ancient Huns nobles, but they still cannot determine what the ancient Huns looked like.
Because the human bones dug out from the cemetery were found to be of both white and yellow race after DNA testing, it can be called an ethnographic museum.
And this is also a normal situation on the grassland. When the Huns were strong, everyone on the grassland was Huns. After the rise of Xianbei, the people on the grassland became Xianbei again.
In other words, national consciousness in ancient societies was far less than it is today, so even if civilization was really destroyed by means of mitigating resistance, such time-consuming and laborious methods would not be necessary.
"If this is not the case, then I think the most likely reason is that there are indeed records, but they do not like to use clay tablets or stones to record information, but choose some perishable organic matter." Liang En continued.
"We can even go one step further and suspect that they did not use words, but more exotic things to record the history, such as some special ropes or knots."
This is not Liang En's guess, but has been proven by history. For example, the Inca Empire was like this. They were a civilization without writing, and they recorded things by tying knots on alpaca wool threads of different colors and thicknesses. .
The same is true for the Indians. Their memory rope is a strip on a bead rope composed of purple and white shell beads, or a strip on a strip composed of shell beads of various colors.
Its significance is that certain strings of beads are linked to certain facts, thereby arranging various events into a series and allowing people to remember them accurately. These strips and ribbons of wampum are the only documentation of the Iroquois people.
But the problem is that these things require trained interpreters who can interpret the various records recorded on the belt from the beads and patterns on the belt.
Therefore, after encountering the massacre by the colonists, these ropes quickly became completely dead words, which cannot be restored even today.
In addition, China also used this method in very ancient times, such as "Yi. "Xici Xia" records the sentence "In ancient times, people tied knots to rule, and later generations of saints changed it with written contracts." This sentence also left behind the idiom of knotting ropes to record events.
Therefore, according to Liang En's analysis, Troy is very likely to look like this, so people simply cannot find any real record of events from the large amount of organic matter that has begun to carbonize.
"If this is the case, it is possible." Professor Liu quite agreed with this conjecture. "Also, almost all the people who could read and write gathered in the city at that time, so after the war, their method of recording various items was lost. .”