Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

There is a reason why Liang En praised this thing as an important weapon of the country, because both the size and the level of carving on it all reflected the highest technical level of that era.

It can be said that even today, it is not a simple matter to use a complete piece of stone to process a cup of such a shape and carve various patterns on the surface, let alone more than 5,000 years ago.

"I believe this thing will become our national treasure in Iraq." As a representative of local officials, Warda said seriously. "Because the amount of information contained in it is really too great."

The sculpture on the container can be said to be very clear, so it is naturally easy to explain. According to the results of everyone's discussion, a simple explanation is that a certain king was worshiping the goddess Ishtar.

There is also a complex interpretation that the king may have been the chief priest of the entire city-state and had a sacred marriage with the goddess.

This is mainly because in the scene behind the two ram carvings, the king and goddess can be seen as both real people and statues. Their union ensured Uruk's fertility and harvests.

It was a very common thing for early civilizations that the leader of a region was not only the leader in the administrative sense, but also the leader of the army and the highest-ranking clergy.

And now this cultural relic reflects this. It may be out of showing their piety to the gods, or they may simply feel that they should offer their best things to the gods, so they made such an exquisite bottle.

As for the method of displaying worship, it is also very simple. The craftsmen recreated the complete sacrificial ceremony of more than 5,000 years ago on the surface of this container. From an art historical perspective, this cultural relic also became the earliest complete narrative. The presentation of sexual art.

So no matter what angle you look at, no matter what era it is in, this thing can be called a national treasure-level cultural relic. This also means that Liang En and the others have indeed found a very important discovery this time.

"It's a pity that we don't know what this place is yet." After confirming the preciousness of this bottle, Liang En sighed, "A city like this should not leave its own name in history."

"I think we may have found some clues." As soon as Liang En finished speaking, Professor Wang, the leader of the Chinese archaeological team, said, "The ruins we excavated before had some fragments of clay tablets with inscriptions on them."

"However, because most of them are just fragments and they are all mixed together, we have not been able to put together a list of goods for the time being. We can only judge the goods list."

After finishing speaking, Professor Wang sent the photos he had taken to Liang En. Sure enough, the text recorded above was a process of distributing items.

According to the records above, they distributed three cans of beer to each person in the group that worked the most, while the other groups only had two cans.

As the oldest farming nation, the Sumerians were good at brewing beer, and they also liked to use beer as a general equivalent to exchange goods or pay for labor.

In fact, this custom continued into the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt. At that time, the Egyptian Pharaoh provided beer and bread as payment to soldiers and workers.

According to some unearthed cultural relics, the Sumerians mastered the brewing method of beer as early as 6,000 years ago. In the Godin Hills area of ​​the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, the Sumerians left documents related to beer making methods.

In addition, the unearthed cultural relics record a "Hymn to the Goddess Ninkasi", which mentions the beer goddess "Ninkasi" in the Mesopotamian plain and the beer brewing technology.

Of course, the beer here is different from the beer of later generations. From an archaeological perspective, beer generally refers to anything brewed mainly from grains. It's not so much beer as it is porridge with a sweet taste made through brewing.

According to this theory, Chinese rice wine, thick wine, and even glutinous rice wine can all be called beer. At least Liang En feels that purely in terms of style and taste, glutinous rice wine is closer to these ancient beers.

In other words, the reason why these ancient Sumerians liked beer was not because of the insufficient alcohol content, but because of the large amount of sugar produced after fermentation.

And to be honest, the biggest advantage of this type of ancient beer compared to modern beer is that it is rich in nutrients and high in calories. This was very important for the ancients who lived in an era of scarcity.

"Yes, this should be an account book used by the ancient Sumerians to record some changes in circumstances. After identifying the contents of this clay tablet, Liang En nodded. "Approximately how many clay tablets are left that you have not spelled out? ? "

"A lot. Although we have not made detailed statistics, it is estimated that it is at least more than 300kg." Professor Wang smiled helplessly.

"We have already started working together, but because everything is broken and mixed together, it may take half a year to eight months to completely sort out these things, and this is also the fastest speed."

"Then you can try the system I prepared." After hearing what he said. Liang En recommended the software system he had prepared, "The ability to put together this bottle so quickly depends entirely on that system."

This system has actually been patented and is intended to be commercialized. It's a pity that not many people use these things for the time being, so Liang En's gift is also intended to be a small advertisement.

"Ah, thank you so much." After seeing the gift from Liang En, Professor Wang thanked him with a smile, "We will try this system tonight to see if we can find any valuable information."

So starting from the afternoon of that day, all the scanners began to operate at full capacity. Everyone labeled the fragments of the clay tablets, and then used the scanners to start a comprehensive scan and store them in the computer.

This is a somewhat trivial and complicated job, because the scanning efficiency of the scanner itself is not very fast, but this is not a bad thing for Liang En and the others, as it means that everyone can complete the job in shifts.

In addition to maintaining morale, one of the biggest advantages of working in shifts is to reduce errors. Because this job requires repeating several similar actions over and over again, problems can easily arise if one person works for a long time.

After all, the work of scanning those things is different from the work of workers on the production line. This is work that requires enough care and patience, so they are more concerned about the accuracy of this work than efficiency.

Also in the pursuit of accuracy, each operation is carried out by two people, one of whom is responsible for scanning and the other for checking to ensure that there are no problems in the scan.

This is also reflected in the subsequent work. On average, everyone must change every half an hour to 40 minutes, because once this time is exceeded, our accuracy will greatly decrease.

Fortunately, this software is relatively easy to use, so by the end of the night they had successfully put together more than 60 clay tablets.

Next was Liang En's work, because he was the only one here who could accurately read these ancient cuneiform characters, so after dinner he came to the laboratory and started his work.