Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?
龙腾网/翻译加工厂2018-05-15 17:17:16中华文明古埃及332336
最近一项新的研究重新激发了关于华夏之源的世纪大辩论。三月份周末的一个凉爽夜晚，地球化学家孙卫东在位于安徽合肥的中科大向普通听众、学生和教授发表了一场公开演讲，演讲的内容不仅只涉及地球化学，还列举数本古代典籍，并一度引用司马迁《史记》对传统认为始于公元前2070年终于公元前1600年夏帝国地形地貌的描述，“水流北播，为九河”，司马迁在他的历史巨著中写道“同为逆河，入于海。”
new study has energized a century-long debate at the heart of China's national identity.
最近一项新的研究重新激发了关于华夏之源的世纪大辩论。
On a cool Sunday evening in March a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen students and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s descxtion of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.”
三月份周末的一个凉爽夜晚，地化学家孙卫东在位于安徽合肥的中科大向普通听众、学生和教授发表了一场公开演讲，演讲的内容不仅只涉及地球化学，还列举数本古代典籍，并一度引用司马迁《史记》对传统认为始于公元前2070年终于公元前1600年夏帝国地形地貌的描述，“水流北播，为九河”，司马迁在他的历史巨著中写道“同为逆河，入于海。”
In other words “the stream” in question wasn’t China’s famed Yellow River which flows from west to east. “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. “The Nile” someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta — with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author a researcher at the same institute watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.
换句话说，这条河流并不是中国西往东流的黄河，“世界上只有一条往北流的大河，它时哪一条？”教授问道，“尼罗河”有人回答。孙卫东然后展示了一张埃及尼罗河及其三角洲的地图——九条支流北流注入地中海。研究所的研究员和听众看着地图会心大笑，并议论纷纷，这些古老的文字记载似乎更切合埃及的地理环境而不是中国。
In the past year Sun a highly decorated scientist has ignited a passionate online debate with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were not in any sense Chinese but actually migrants from Egypt. He conceived of this connection in the 1990s while performing radiometric dating of ancient Chinese bronzes; to his surprise their chemical composition more closely resembled those of ancient Egyptian bronzes than native Chinese ores. Both Sun’s ideas and the controversy surrounding them flow out of a much older tradition of nationalist archaeology in China which for more than a century has sought to answer a basic scientific question that has always been heavily politicized: Where do the Chinese people come from?
去年，孙卫东在互联网上掀起了有关中国文明是否是来自于古埃及的激烈辩论。早在1990年，孙卫东就通过对中国青铜器进行放射同位素测试，大胆构思了中国文明来自于古埃及。用来制作中国青铜器的矿石的化学同位素看起来更接近古埃及的青铜器，而非中国本土矿石。孙卫东的观点和网络上的争议是传统考古学在中国的一个多世纪以来一直试图回答的一个基本科学问题，但一直被严重政治化了。中国人到底来自何方？
Sun argues that China’s Bronze Age technology widely thought by scholars to have first entered the northwest of the country through the prehistoric Silk Road actually came by sea. According to him its bearers were the Hyksos the Western Asian people who ruled parts of northern Egypt as foreigners between the 17th and 16th centuries B.C. until their eventual expulsion. He notes that the Hyksos possessed at an earlier date almost all the same remarkable technology — bronze metallurgy chariots literacy domesticated plants and animals — that archaeologists discovered at the ancient city of Yin the capital of China’s second dynasty the Shang between 1300 and 1046 B.C. Since the Hyksos are known to have developed ships for war and trade that enabled them to sail the Red and Mediterranean seas Sun speculates that a small population escaped their collapsing dynasty using seafaring technology that eventually brought them and their Bronze Age culture to the coast of China.
孙卫东的观点认为，被学者们普遍认同通过丝绸之路首次传播到西域各国的中国青铜时代的科技其实是通过海洋过来的。按照他的观点，公元前17世纪-16世纪传播这些技术的希克索斯人一直被当作外国人生活在中国，直到被中国驱逐。他指出希克索斯王朝在更早的时候拥有几乎所有同样引人注目的技术----铜冶金车辆识字驯化的植物和动物考古学家发现了中国第二王朝的首都公元前1300年和1046年之间，希克索斯王朝的船只用来战争和商业贸易，使他们的一小部分人口通过航海技术逃脱他们崩溃的王朝；最终使他们和他们的青铜时代文化出现在中国的海岸。
Sun’s thesis proved controversial when the Chinese travel site Kooniao first posted it online in the form of a 93000-character essay in September 2015. As the liberal magazine Caixincommented “His courageous title and plain language attracted the interest of more than a few readers.” That title was Explosive Archaeological Discovery: The Ancestors of the Chinese People Came from Egypt and the essay was reproduced and discussed online on internet portals such as Sohu and popular message boards such as Zhihu and Tiexue. Kooniao also set up a widely read page dedicated to the subject on the microblogging platform Weibo — hashtagged “Chinese People Come From Egypt” — which contains a useful sample of responses from the public. Some of these simply express outrage often to the point of incoherence: “That expert’s absurd theory randomly accepts anyone as his forebears” fumed one. “This is people’s deep inferiority complex at work!” Another asked “How can the children of the Yellow Emperor have run over to Egypt? This topic is really too pathetic. The important thing is to live in the moment!”
在2015年9月，孙卫东在中国旅游网酷鸟网发布了一篇带有争议观点的93000字的文章。自由派杂志Caixincommented说“他大胆的标题和平实的语言抓住了不少读者的眼球”。标题是爆炸性的考古发现:中国人民的祖先来自埃及（在线门户网站对文章进行转载和讨论如搜狐和流行留言板网站和铁血网等）。酷鸟网还在微博页面建立了专题页面----标签“中国人来自埃及”这个标题引起公众不同凡响的反应。其中的一些简单地表达愤怒的意义:“专家的荒谬理论可以接受任何人作为他的祖先”。“这让中国人民深深的感到自卑!”另一个问道:“黄帝的孩子怎么能跑到埃及?这个话题真的是太可悲了。重要的是活在当下!”
Other commentators have been more thoughtful. If they are not fully convinced they are at least willing to entertain Sun’s ideas. In fact a rough count of comments from the intellectually curious outnumbers those of the purely reactionary by about 3-to-2. As one user wrote “I approve. One has to look intelligently at this theory. Whether it turns to be true or false it is worth investigating.” Another wrote “The world is such a big place that one finds many strange things in it. One can’t say it is impossible.” One more wrote “One can’t just sweepingly dismiss it as wrong or curse out the evidence as false. Exchanges between cultures can be very deep and distant.”
其他评论者更加深思熟虑。即便没有完全相信，他们至少愿意接受孙的想法。事实上据粗略统计理智探讨和纯粹反对的评论数量之比约为3：2。正如一个用户写道:“我同意，我们必须明智地审视这一理论。不管它会是真的还是假的都是值得调查的。”另一位写道:“世界是如此之大其中发现了许多奇怪的事物，不能说这是不可能的。”还有一个写道:“不能只是笼统地将其视为错误的，或咒骂这个证据是假的。文化之间的交流可以是非常深刻和遥远的。”
Anticipating his critics Sun wrote online that to examine anew the origins of Chinese civilization “may appear ridiculous in the eyes of some because historians long ago stated clearly: We are the children of the Yan and Yellow Emperor.” Historian Sima Qian took these legendary figures as the progenitor of the Han Chinese; and the Yellow Emperor’s great-grandson Yu the Great as the founder of the semimythical Xia dynasty. These served as the origin stories for imperial China and continued to be credited for decades after the Republic replaced it in 1912 so that even the nation’s most iconoclastic and rebellious sons — Sun Yat-Sen Chiang Kai-Shek and People’s Republic founder Mao Zedong among them — have at some time or other felt the need to pay their respects at the Yellow Emperor’s tomb. Even now the oft-repeated claim that Chinese civilization is approximately 5000 years old takes as its starting point the supposed reign of this legendary emperor.
预料到他的批评者的孙在网上说要重新研究中国文明的起源，"可能在有些人眼里重新研究是可笑的，因为历史学家早就明确指出：我们是炎黄子孙。”史记·太史公把传说中的人物作为中国汉族的祖先;黄帝的曾孙大禹是传说中夏王朝的创建者。这些作为中国帝制起源故事，在1912年被共和国取代之后继续仍被铭记了几十年，即使是全民族最特立独行的叛逆儿子 - 孙中山蒋介石和人民共和国创始人毛泽东，也会在某个时间或其他认为有必要的时候去黄帝的陵墓瞻仰。即使是现在也反复宣称中国文明上下五千年（以这个传奇黄帝的王朝作为起点）。
Unbeknownst to many an anti-Qing Dynasty agitator was the first to publish (under a pseudonym) this claim for the nation’s antiquity in 1903. As his nationalist ideology had it “If we desire to preserve the survival of the Han Nation then it is imperative that we venerate the Yellow Emperor.” At that time the Qing dynasty was in serious decline its obvious backwardness compared with Western powers the cause of much soul-searching. Anti-Qing intellectuals began to examine critically the roots of Chinese civilization and for the first time seized on the idea that they lay in the West. The work that most captured their imagination was that of the French philologist Albert Terrien de Lacouperie who in 1892 published the Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization from 2300 B.C. to 200 A.D. Translated into Chinese in 1903 it compared the hexagrams of the Book of Changes with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia and proposed that Chinese civilization originated in Babylon. The Yellow Emperor was identified with a King Nakhunte who supposedly led his people out of the Middle East and into the Central Plain of the Yellow River Valley around 2300 B.C.
大多数人不知道，1903年，一名反清革命党人第一次发表了（用笔名）中国古代起源的这种主张，缘于他“欲保汉族之生存，必得尊黄帝”的民族主义思想。当时清朝处于严重衰退，与西方列强相比明显落后，这导致了许多深刻反思。反清学者开始批判中华文明的根源，并第一次采纳了它们存在于西方的观点。最吸引他们想像力的著作是法裔英国语言学家拉克伯里在1892年出版的《中国上古文明的西方起源：从公元前2300年至公元200年》。此书在1903年被翻译成中文，书中将易经中的卦与美索不达米亚楔形文字相比较，提出中国文明起源于巴比伦的观点。黄帝被认为是国王Nakhunte，据称在公元前2300年左右，他带领人民走出中东，进入黄河流域中原地带。
Liu Shipei the Peking University history professor and true author behind the pseudonymous chronology of the Yellow Emperor was among the first to promote Sino-Babylonianism in books such as his 1903History of the Chinese Nation. By 1915 the theory was widespread enough that the national anthem of the republic commissioned by President Yuan Shikai referred to it obliquely calling China “the famous descendant from Kunlun Peak” which Chinese mythology locates in the far far West. Another endorsement came from Sun Yat-Sen founder of the Republic of China who stated in his 1924 Three Principles of the People lectures that the “growth of Chinese civilization may … be explained by the fact that the settlers who migrated from another place to this valley already possessed a very high civilization.”
刘师培，北京大学历史教授，《黄帝纪年论》背后的实际作者，是首批著书推介中国-巴比伦起源论的人，1903年发表的《中国民族史》便是其一。到了1915年，这种理论广为传播，以至于由总统袁世凯批准的中华民国国歌也间接地引用，称“华胄从来昆仑巅”，昆仑是中国神话中位于遥远西方的山。另一位为此理论背书者是孙逸仙，中华民国的创建者，在1924年的《三民主义讲义》中称“中国文明的成长也许……可以解释为从它处迁移来这片流域的定居者在此之前已经拥有极高文明”。
To these and other revolutionaries Sino-babylonianism was not only the latest European scientific opinion. It was the hope that since China shared the same ancestry as other great civilizations there was no ultimate reason why it should not catch up with more advanced nations in Europe and America.
对他们这些革命者而言，中国-巴比伦起源论不仅仅是最新的欧洲科学观点。它还是一种希望，既然中国和其它伟大的文明有共同的祖先，那么没什么理由中国最终不能赶上欧美等先进国家。
Sino-Babylonianism fell out of favor in China during the late 1920s and early 1930s when Japanese aggression escalated and a different nationalist politics took hold. Chinese historians seeking to distance China from imperialist powers cast a critical eye on Western origin theories and their earlier supporters. At around the same time modern scientific archaeology was debuting in China. The discovery of Neolithic pottery in Longshan Shandong in 1928 showed that eastern China had been inhabited by indigenous groups before the Bronze Age migration Lacouperie had posited. In the same year excavation of the city of Yin began. On account of the excellence of the Yin-Shang’s material culture — its famous oracle bones for example whose writing is the ancestor of the modern Chinese scxt used today — that polity is often considered the “root of Chinese civilization” situated well within China’s borders in present-day Anyang Henan.
中国-巴比伦起源论在20世纪20年代末至30年代初失宠，当时日本侵略升级，一种不同的民族主义政治学占据了主流。中国历史学家寻求摆脱帝国主义列强，对西方起源论和它们的支持者投以批判的眼光。与此同时现代科学考古学在中国亮相。1928年在山东龙山发现新石器时代的陶器，表明在拉克伯里提出的青铜时代迁徙之前中国东部已有土著部落居住。同年殷的城市开始挖掘。由于殷商物质文化的卓越性——例如著名的甲骨文（它是现代汉字的鼻祖)——其政体通常被认为是“中国文明的根源”，它坐落在中国境内，今河南安阳。
In the end Western origin theories were replaced by what sounds like a compromise: a dual-origin theory of Chinese civilization. The view proposed that Eastern Neolithic culture moving West encountered Western Neolithic culture moving East fusing to form the progenitors of the Shang. It held steady until the 1950s.
后来西方起源论被一种听起来像是让步的理论所替代：中国文明双重起源论。其观点是东方新石器时代文化向西扩散过程中遇到西方新石器时代文化向东扩散，两者融合形成商的祖先。在20世纪50年代前这种理论稳居主流。
But Chinese archeology took a radical swing toward more extreme nationalism after the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China when in the words of the historian James Leibold “China’s scientific community closed inward on itself.” Nationalism and authoritarianism required the interpretation of archaeological evidence as proof that Chinese civilization had arisen natively without outside influences. As the Sichuan University archaeologist — and eventual dissident — Tong Enzheng wrote in his fascinating account of the politicization of scholarship between 1949 and 1979: “Mao Zedong implemented a comprehensive anti-Western policy after 1949” which expanded “already extant anti-imperialism … ultimately becoming total anti-foreignism. Unavoidably Chinese archaeology was affected.”
但是在1949年中华人民共和国成立后，中国考古学朝着极端民族主义急剧转向，用历史学家詹姆斯·雷伯德的话说“中国科学界向内自我封闭”。民族主义和威权主义需要考古证据的解释来证明中国文明是不受外来影响独立发展起来的。四川大学考古学家童恩正（最终成了不同政见者）引人入胜地描绘了1949年至1979年学术政治化的情形：“1949年以后毛泽东实行全面反西方政策”，将“本已存在的反帝国主义”扩大到“最终成为完全排外主义。中国考古学也不可避免地受到了影响”。
Maoism also required a belief that Chinese civilization had developed in accordance with “obxtive” Marxist historical laws from a primitive band to a socialist society. Mao-era archaeologists thus strove to use their findings to prove these laws legitimizing the status quo. As Xia Nai the director of the Institute of Archaeology himself wrote in a 1972 paper “We archaeologists must follow the guide of Marxism Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong conscientiously fulfilling the great guiding principle of Chairman Mao to ‘make the past serve the present.’” It’s no surprise then that during the Cultural Revolution meetings were convened under such absurd headings as “Using the Antiquities Stored in the Temple of Confucius in Qufu County to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius.” Meanwhile revolutionary sloganeering found its way into scientific publications alongside the data.
毛泽东思想也要求此种信念：中国文明的发展与马克思唯物史观的规律相一致，从原始社会到社会主义社会。于是毛时代的历史学家努力用他们的发现证明这些规律契合现状。正如考古研究所所长夏鼐1972年在论文中所写“我们考古学家必须以马列主义、毛泽东思想为指导，认真落实毛主席‘让过去服务现在’的伟大纲领”。文革期间召开一些荒谬的会议也就不足为奇了，比如“用曲阜县孔庙保存古物批判林彪和孔子”。同时革命口号在科学出版物中和数据一起占据了一席之地。
Blatant ideological bias faded from scientific endeavors in the post-1978 reform era but the ultimate goal of Chinese archaeology — to piece out the nation’s history — remained. The best-known example from that era is the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project directly inspired by the achievements of Egyptian archaeology. State Councilor Song Jian toured Egypt in 1995 and was particularly impressed by a genealogy of the pharaohs that went back to the third millennium B.C. This prompted him to campaign for a project — included in the government’s ninth five-year plan — that would give Chinese dynasties a comparable record. Mobilizing over 200 experts on a budget of around $1.5 million over five years the Chronology Project has been considered the largest state-sponsored project in the humanities since 1773 when the Qianlong emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu an encyclopedia roughly 20 times the length of the Britannica.
在78年之后的改革开放时期，荒谬的意识形态偏见淡出了科学探索活动。但是，中国考古的终极目标仍致力于串连完善中国历史。期间，最为人所知的事例是夏商周断代编年工程。此工程直接受到埃及考古研究成就的启发。1995年，国务委员宋健访问埃及期间，发现埃及法老的总谱上溯到公元前3000年，深受触动。这促使他为此而努力争取到了一个项目，此项目写进中国第九个五年计划，旨在使中国拥有相当的历史记录。该项目动员了超过200个专家，五年预算一千五百万，被认为是以来人类历史上，自1773年清朝乾隆皇帝下令编撰的20倍于大英百科全市的四库全书以来，政府资助的最大的编年工程。
Some questioned the Chronology Project’s motives. One of the most prominent detractors was University of Chicago historian Edward L. Shaughnessy who complained “There’s a chauvinistic desire to push the historical record back into the third millennium B.C. putting China on a par with Egypt. It’s much more a political and a nationalistic urge than a scholarly one.” Others criticized the project’s methods and results. The Stanford archaeologist Li Liu for instance took issue with the fact that it regarded the Xia as historical and fixed dates for it when there is still no conclusive archaeological evidence for its existence.
对一些年代学科研项目的动机表示疑虑。其中一个最为突出的批评者就是芝加哥大学的历史学家爱德华L·肖内西，他指责”有的抱有沙文主义的人（指有的中国人）期望将历史记录推后到公元前三千年之前以使中国与埃及相提评论。与其说这些期望是由学术目的推动的，不如说是由政治和民族主义推动的。“其他批评的在于这些项目的方法和最终结果。斯坦福大学的考古学家刘莉举例，她对一些研究将夏视为是历史并且固定在某一时期，却仍然没有决定性的考古证据证明夏的存在抱有异议。
But the project also had defenders including Harvard anthropologist Yun Kuen Lee who pointed out that “the intrinsic relationship between the study of the past and nationalism does not necessarily imply that the study of the past is inherently corrupted.” The usefulness of archaeology in bolstering a nation’s pride and legitimacy — explaining and to some extent justifying its language culture and territorial claims — means that most archaeological traditions have a nationalistic impulse behind them. Thus in Israel archaeology focuses on the period of the Old Testament; in the Scandinavian countries it focuses on that of the Vikings. “The important question that we should ask” Yun went on to say “is if the scientists of the project were able to maintain scientific rigor.”
但是这些科研项目依旧有很多支捍卫者，包括哈佛大学的人类学家李云坤（音译）指出“历史研究和民族主义两者之间的本质的关联，未必意味着民族主义对历史研究存在固有地破坏。”考古学在支撑一个国家的自豪和正统上的效用——解释和对一些如它的语言文化范围的辩护和领土主张——意味着最先的考古学的的传统背后包含着民族主义的推动力。因此，在以色列的考古学焦点在于旧约的时期；斯堪的纳维亚的国家的考古焦点在于维京人的历史。“我们应当问的最重要的问题”李云坤继续说道“在于科学家的研究项目是否能坚持科学的严谨性。”
In some ways Sun’s current theory is an unintended result of the Chronology Project’s scientific rigor. At the project’s launch in 1996 he was a Ph.D. student in the radiation laboratory of the University of Science and Technology. Of the 200 or so items of bronze ware he was responsible for analyzing some came from the city of Yin. He found that the radioactivity of these Yin-Shang bronzes had almost exactly the same characteristics as that of ancient Egyptian bronzes suggesting that their ores all came from the same source: African mines.
在某种程度上，孙现在的推测来自于考古科研项目的科学严谨所带来的非有意的结果。在1996年他科研项目的开始，他作为一个博士生在科学与技术大学的放射实验室。在大约两百个青铜器的科研项目中，他负责的是分析一些来自于殷墟的青铜器。他发现一些殷墟的青铜器的放射性的特征几乎完全和古埃及的青铜器一致，这暗示着两者的矿物材料都来自于同一个来源：非洲矿山。
Perhaps anticipating serious controversy Sun’s doctoral supervisor did not allow Sun to report his findings at the time. Sun was asked to hand over his data and switched to another project. Twenty years after the start of his research and now a professor in his own right Sun is finally ready to say all he knows about the Yin-Shang and China’s Bronze Age culture.
孙的博士生导师预料到这会产生严重争议所以没有让孙在当时报告他的发现。孙被要求交出他的数据并转到到另一个项目。从他研究开始的二十多年以后，拥有教授身份的他终于准备说他所知道的殷商与中国青铜时代的文化。
Although the public has mostly received Sun’s theory with an open mind it still lies outside the academic mainstream. Since the 1990s most Chinese archaeologists have accepted that much of the nation’s Bronze Age technology came from regions outside of China. But it is not thought to have arrived directly from the Middle East in the course of an epic migration. The more prosaic consensus is that it was transmitted into China from Central Asia by a slow process of cultural exchange (trade tribute dowry) across the northern frontier mediated by Eurasian steppe pastoralists who had contacts with indigenous groups in both regions.
虽然外界大多以开放的心态接收孙的理论，但它仍处于学术界主流之外。自90年代以来，大多数中国的考古学家已经接受了很多青铜时代的技术都是从中国地区之外传入的。但并不认为在一个史诗般的迁徙的过程中，从中东直接到达。它是穿越北部边疆以欧亚草原牧民为媒介，通过较为缓慢的文化交流（贸易嫁妆贡品）的方式从中亚传到中国。
Despite this the fascination with ancient Egypt appears unlikely to go away soon. As the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology project demonstrated the sentiment has deep
politically tinged roots. These were on display again during President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Egypt in January to commemorate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. On arrival Xi greeted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with an Egyptianproverb: “Once you drink from the Nile you are destined to return.” They celebrated the antiquity of their two civilizations with a joint visit to the Luxor temple.
尽管如此，古埃及的魅力不像是会消失的如此之快。鉴于夏商周研究项目表现出强烈的政治色彩。在习近平主席一月份为纪念中埃两国建交60周年对埃及进行的国事访问中这一观点又一次展现，一到达埃及习主席就用一句埃及谚语“喝过尼罗河河水的人一定会回来的”向埃及总统阿卜杜勒·法塔赫·塞西问候，两人在参观卢克索神庙中畅聊两国古老文明特色。
It remains to be seen whether Sun’s evidence will be incorporated into mainstream politics to prove a long-standing Sino-Egyptian cultural relationship. But if it is the proverb Xi uttered after he set foot in Egypt will have been strangely prophetic.
孙卫东论证的有一个长期存在的中埃文化关系的观点能否被纳入主流学术界还有待观察，但如果他是对的，那么习主席踏上埃及所说的谚语将成为不可思议的预言。
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