纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 060基尔瓦陶器碎片（8）

 

The last piece of pottery¹ makes this point very well. It's brown, it's a fragment of fired clay, and it's got bold raised decoration. It's pottery clearly made for cooking and for everyday use, the clay is local and the manufacture is distinctly African. And it shows that the African inhabitants of Kilwa, while happily enjoying and collecting foreign pottery, continued, as people always do, to cook in their own traditional way with their own traditional pots. And it's pots like this one that also tell us that the Africans were themselves sailing and trading across the Indian Ocean, because fragments like these ones have been found in ports across the Middle East. And we know from other sources that African merchants traded to India, and that cities of the Swahili strip were sending their own envoys² to the Chinese court.

As I said at the start of this programme, when we put an ocean and not a country at the centre of our histories, it can radically³ change our perceptions of what happened in the past, and why. It's a theme that's been explored by Abdulrazak Gurnah:

最后一组陶片很好地证实了这一点。它们是棕色窑烧陶片，带着醒目的浮纹，是日常餐具或厨具，使用的黏土产于当地，工艺也具有明显的非洲风格。基尔瓦的?非洲居民在愉快地享用外来陶瓷的同时，也用自己的传统陶罐依传统的方式烹饪食物。这样的陶罐也证实了非洲人当年曾跨越印度洋进行贸易，因为在中东的港口也发现了类似的陶片。另有史料告诉我们，非洲商人曾去印度经商，斯瓦希里文化带中的诸座城市也曾向中国朝廷派遣使节。

1 pottery   

n.陶器，陶器场

参考例句：

• My sister likes to learn art pottery in her spare time.我妹妹喜欢在空余时间学习陶艺。
• The pottery was left to bake in the hot sun.陶器放在外面让炎热的太阳烘晒焙干。

2 envoys   

使节( envoy的名词复数 )； 公使； 谈判代表； 使节身份

参考例句：

• the routine tit for tat when countries expel each other's envoys 国家相互驱逐对方使节这种惯常的报复行动
• Marco Polo's travelogue mentions that Kublai Khan sent envoys to Malgache. 马可波罗游记中提到忽必烈曾派使节到马尔加什。

3 radically   

ad.根本地，本质地

参考例句：

• I think we may have to rethink our policies fairly radically. 我认为我们可能要对我们的政策进行根本的反思。
• The health service must be radically reformed. 公共医疗卫生服务必须进行彻底改革。