纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 016洪水纪念碑（1）

016： EPISODE 16 -Flood Tablet 洪水纪念碑

Abstract摘要 :

Flood Tablet (made around 700 - 600 BC). Clay writing tablet from northern Iraq

洪水纪念碑（公元前700-600年左右制作）。伊拉克北部的粘土书写板

MP3听力原文：

When you think about rain that falls for 'forty days and forty nights', you might just be considering the prospect of living through yet another summer in Britain. But of course, what you're really referring to is the biblical story of Noah, his ark and the Great Flood - a story that's become so much part of our language, that any child in the country can tell you that the animals went in two by two.

But the story of the Great Flood is itself one that goes back far beyond the Bible to many other societies, and is part of a global collective consciousness. Why? How did a story like Noah's Flood, so ancient, come into being? And for me, that leads to the next question - when did the idea of writing down a story at all begin?

 

It's no ark, but the main entrance of the British Museum is at least dry - and the visitors certainly come in more than two by two. What's great about museum collections is that they let you stride through the centuries and across the continents in a single afternoon, without even getting wet. This week, I'll be striding across a tightly interconnected world that stretched from the southern Nile to the Black Sea, and from Greece to Iran - it's a world that flourished about three and a half thousand years ago, so around 1500 BC. The objects I'm going to be looking at raise big questions and very big ideas, like the origins of mathematics and, in this programme, the beginnings of literature.