纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（3）

 

There are a lot of bits here in this drawer in the British Museum, but the handful that I've just picked out can tell us a great deal. The largest piece is about the size of a postcard, and the smallest roughly half the size of a credit card. And the pieces fall easily into three distinct groups. There's a couple of smooth, pale green pieces that look very like modern expensive china. Then there are other small pieces with blue patterning - and then there's a third group, that are of unglazed natural clay, decorated in quite high relief. The pots that these fragments were once part of, in fact, come from widely different parts of the world, but between six and nine hundred years ago all these fragments were thrown away in one place - on the same beach in East Africa. They were found at the bottom of a low crumbling¹ cliff at Kilwa Kisiwani island, in Tanzania.

Today Kilwa is a quiet Tanzanian island with a few small fishing villages, but around the year 1200 it was a thriving port city, and you can still find the ruins of its great stone buildings and of the largest mosque² of its time in sub-Saharan Africa. A later Portuguese³ visitor here describes the city as he found it in 1502:

我选择的这一捧碎片蕴含着很多故事。最大的一块约有明信片大小，最小的则只有半张信用卡大。从外形看可分成三组。第一组表面光滑，呈淡绿色，类似现代的昂贵瓷器；第二组带蓝色图案；第三组则是没有上釉的粗陶，布满浮雕图案。它们早先各自待在世界上相距甚远的角落，但在公元六百年至公元九百年间却被扔到了同一个地方—一东非的海滩。它们都是在基尔瓦岛一处坍塌的低矮悬崖下被发现的。

如今的基尔瓦只是一个宁静的坦桑尼亚小岛，岛上散布着几个小渔村，但在公元一千二百年左右，它曾是一个繁华的海港城市。岛上至今还留有许多大型石制建筑遗址，以及一度作为撒哈拉沙漠以南地区规模最大的清真寺的遗址。一五二年，一位葡萄牙访客发现这座城市时这样形容：

 

1 crumbling   

adj.摇摇欲坠的

参考例句：

• an old house with crumbling plaster and a leaking roof 一所灰泥剥落、屋顶漏水的老房子
• The boat was tied up alongside a crumbling limestone jetty. 这条船停泊在一个摇摇欲坠的石灰岩码头边。

2 mosque   

n.清真寺

参考例句：

• The mosque is a activity site and culture center of Muslim religion.清真寺为穆斯林宗教活动场所和文化中心。
• Some years ago the clock in the tower of the mosque got out of order.几年前，清真寺钟楼里的大钟失灵了。

3 Portuguese   

n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语

参考例句：

• They styled their house in the Portuguese manner.他们仿照葡萄牙的风格设计自己的房子。
• Her family is Portuguese in origin.她的家族是葡萄牙血统。