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We will get to the very beginning of human history, but I'm not going to start there because I want to begin with the mummies -which is where I began when I first came through these doors into the British Museum in 1954 at the age of eight, and I think that's where most people begin when they first visit a museum.
我们以后会回到初民时期，但是我的故事并不始于彼时，因为我打算先讲述木乃伊——1954年八岁的我第一次穿越大英博物馆的重门，首先映入眼帘的便是那些木乃伊，它们是我探索世界史的开端。我猜测多数访客的博物馆之行也始于此处。
It's a pretty safe bet that most of the children you can hear round about me are also headed for the Egyptian mummies. What fascinated me then was the mummies themselves, the thrilling gruesome thought of the dead bodies, but I'm now much more interested in the mummy cases - and I've chosen one particular mummy case for this opening programme, because it carries all the different kinds of messages across the millennia, signals from the past if you like, that 'things' can communicate to us, and that I'm going to be looking for in all the objects in this series.
我敢说你现在听到的我身边这些孩子也是冲着木乃伊去的。当时我着迷的是那些木乃伊本身，它们激起了我对死尸既兴奋又恐惧的想象，但现在我对这些木乃伊的案例更感兴趣。我特别为首期节目选择了这一典型的木乃伊案例，因为它携带了“人造物”所能传递的穿越千载的远古音信。在这一系列节目中，我将在这些物品中探求这些音信。
Telling history through things, whether it's a mummy's coffin or a credit card, is what museums are for and, because the British Museum has collected things from all over the globe, it's not a bad place to try to tell a world history. Of course it can only be 'a' history of the world, not 'the' history.
通过如木乃伊棺材或信用卡这样的物品讲述历史，是所有博物馆的目标和功能。大英博物馆是用来复述世界简史的一个不错的选择，因为它搜集了世界各地的物品。当然，它所能讲述的只是世界“简史”，而非世界“历史”。
When people come to the museum, they choose their own objects and make their own journey round the world and through time, but I think what they will find, is that their own histories quickly intersect with everybody else's -and when that happens, you no longer have a history of a particular people or nation, but a story of endless connections. Nobody has thought more deeply about this than the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen:
人们造访博物馆时，会依据个人喜好浏览展品，制定自己的时空之旅。但我想，人们会发现，其本族历史旋即与外族史纵横交错，此时，历史已经不再局限于某个民族或国家，而是一个无限延伸、环环相扣的故事。关于这点，印度经济学家、诺贝尔奖得主阿玛蒂亚·森(Amartya Sen)的认识最为深刻：
'I think what is really very important to recognise is that, when we look at the history of the world, we're not looking at the history of different civilisations truncated and separated from each other. They've a huge amount of contact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness.
“我认为认识到这点非常重要，即纵观世界历史，我们看到的并非各大文化彼此隔绝分离的历史。各种文化之间交流丰富，存在着某种内在联系。
So I've always felt, not to think of the history of the world as a history of civilisations, but as a history of world civilisations evolving in often similar, often diverse ways, always interacting with each other. And this is a very different view from the clash of civilisations to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to understand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the general condition of the relationship between people across the world in history.'
所以我始终认为，不应把世界历史视为各种文化的简单结合体，而应是其相互作用，遵循相似又相异的轨道不断进化的历史。我的观点很大程度上背离了几年前提出的文化冲突论。文化冲突是我们理解世界敌对状态的一种方法，但纵观世界历史，这种状态并非人类关系的主流。”
Most of us I think, if we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, have the sense that we've changed enormously, while the things have remained serenely the same, but of course they haven't. Thanks to constant research and to new scientific techniques, what we can know about them is constantly growing. I'm standing now in front of one of the most impressive mummy cases in the British Museum. It was made around 240 BC for a high-ranking Egyptian priest called Hornedjitef.
回到童年时代参观过的博物馆，我们大多会感慨物是人非。然而，这些物品却一直静止不动，但是当然，它们不可能变化的。随着持续的研究和科技的进步，我们对它们的了解不断增长。我现在就站在大英博物馆木乃伊展品中最令人印象深刻的木乃伊身前。它大约制作于公元前240年，主人是一位名为霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)的埃及高级牧师。
There's a massive black outer case in the shape of a human body, there's an elaborately decorated inner case, and then the mummy itself. Everything we know about Hornedjitef, we know from this group of things. He is his own document if you like, and it's a document that continues to give up its secrets. My colleague, John Taylor, has been researching the mummies in the British Museum for over 20 years - I asked him what we have learnt about Hornedjitef since he came to the British Museum:
它包括一个巨大的黑色人形棺套，一个精心装饰的内棺，以及木乃伊本身。我们对霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)的了解均来自这套物品。你可以说霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)就是他自己的一部历史文献，不断地泄露着自己的秘密。我的同事约翰·泰勒(John Taylor)从事博物馆的木乃伊研究已逾20年，我询问他自霍尼杰提夫(Hornedjitef)被移驾到博物馆以来，我们了解到了哪些知识：
