Photo credit: Rama
图片引自:Rama
7、Hurrian Civilization
胡里安文明
Another civilization which influenced the Hittites was the Hurrian people, who lived throughout the Middle East during the second millennium B.C. It’s probable that they were around even earlier than that: Personal and place names written in the Hurrian language were found in Mesopotamian records dating back to the third millennium B.C. Unfortunately, very few artifacts of their civilization exist; most of what we know about them comes from the writings of other cultures, including the Hittites, Sumerians, and Egyptians.
另一个对赫梯人产生过所影响的,是胡里安文明。胡里安人分布于中东地区,生活在公元前的第二个千年里(译注:即指公元前2000~公元前1000年)。他们或许在更早的时代就出现了:以胡里安语书写的人名和地名被发现存在于美索不达米亚的历史资料中,后者可追溯至公元前的第三个千年。不幸的是,只有非常少量的胡里安文明手工制品存在于世;我们对他们的所知主要源于 包括包括赫梯、苏美尔以及埃及在内的其他文明的记载。
One of their largest cities is known as Urkesh and is located in northeastern Syria. Urkesh is also where the earliest known text in Hurrian, a stone tablet and statue known as the Louvre lion, was found. Long believed to be mainly nomadic, scholars now believe that the Hurrians may have had a much bigger impact than previously thought, mostly due to the way their language differed from other Semitic and Indo-European tongues. However, by the end of the second millennium B.C., nearly all ethnic traces of the Hurrians had disappeared, with only their influence on the Hittites left behind.
胡里安人最大的城市之一是沃克什(Urkesh),坐落在今叙利亚北部。沃克什亦是胡里安最早的文本——一个石碑和被称为罗浮狮的雕像——的发现地。长期以来人们认为胡里安人以游牧为主。如今,学者们认为胡里安人所产生过的影响或许比我们原想的更大,主要基于其语言与其他闪米特和印欧语系语言差异的形式。无论如何,在公元前第二个世纪的末尾,胡里安民族的踪迹几乎全部消失,只剩他们对赫梯人的影响流传下去。