BBC 100件藏品中的世界史007:Ain Sakhri的恋人
007: Ain Sakhri OR 'THE LOVERS'
第七集——Ain Sakhri的恋人
Ain Sakhri lovers figurine (made around 11,000 years ago). Stone sculpture, found near Bethlehem
Ain Sakhri的恋人塑像，石雕，距今约一万一千年前，出土于伯利恒地区附近。
As the last Ice Age came to an end, somebody picked a pebble out of a small river not far from Bethlehem. It's a pebble that must have been tumbled downstream, banged and smoothed against other stones as it went, in the process that geologists poetically describe as 'chattering'.
随着最后一个冰河时代宣告结束，有人从伯利恒附近流水淙淙的小溪边，捡起了一枚鹅卵石。这肯定是一枚来自下游的卵石了，逐流而下的过程中，受流水冲刷，在砂石间反复翻滚摩擦，直到棱角尽失，成为圆滑可爱的卵石。地质学家们很诗意地将这过程描述为“千锤百炼，终成正果”。
But about 11,000 years ago, a human hand then shaped and chipped this beautifully chattered, rounded pebble into one of the most moving objects in the British Museum. It shows two naked people literally wrapped up in each other. It's the oldest known representation of a couple having sex.
然后大约在一万一千年前左右，一双人手巧妙地将这枚“终成正果”的美丽卵石雕刻成了如今大英博物馆馆藏展品中最动人的一件。它显示了一对赤身裸体的人缠绵紧拥的姿态，这是世界上最早描绘男女性爱的物品。
'Well it's the classic thing that we always imagine that we discovered sex, and that all other ages before us were kind of rather prudish and simple, whereas in fact obviously human beings have been emotionally sophisticated since at least 8,000 BC when this sculpture was made, and just as sophisticated as us, I'm sure.' (Marc Quinn)
“这么经典的东西总能引发我们的想象，我们发现了性爱，而后在当代人之前的漫长岁月里，在这话题上我们总是显得那么拘谨避讳。然而在公元前八千年左右这件雕塑制造出来时，显然我们人类在这方面早已拥有复杂的情感。我相信当时的人类情感之复杂，大概与你我一样。” 马克·奎因说道。
'And I think it's clear that sexuality was a very very important part of the symbolic and social world.' (Ian Hodder)
“我认为很明显的，在当时整个人类象征性与社会性的世界里，性行为已经占据了相当重要的一部分。”伊恩·霍德说道。
At the end of the last Ice Age, as the climate warmed up across the world, humans gradually shifted from hunting and gathering to a settled way of life based on farming - and in the process, our relationship to the natural world was transformed.
在最后一次冰河时代后期，随着全球气候变暖，人类逐渐由过去狩猎与采集过渡到定居农耕的生活方式;在这个过程中，我们与大自然世界的关系在产生了巨变。
From living as a minor part of a balanced ecosystem, we start trying to overcome nature - to take control. In the Middle East the warmer weather brought a spread of rich grasslands. People had been moving around, hunting gazelle and gathering the seeds of lentils, chick peas and wild grasses. But in the new, lusher savannah, gazelle were plentiful and they tended to stay in one place throughout the year, so the humans settled down with them.
以前我们仅仅是作为一个平衡生态大系统中的一小部分因子，现在我们开始尝试来克服大自然，想要赢得主动权。在中东地区，转暖的气候带来了一望无际的浩瀚草原，水草丰茂，土质肥沃。人类曾经迁徙奔波，猎捕瞪羚，采集小扁豆、鹰嘴豆与各种野草的种子;然而在这片崭新而肥沃的稀树大草原之上，瞪羚的数量十分充足，往往常年累月停留在同一地方不迁移，因此人类也随之定居下来。
And once they were settled, they deliberately collected grass grains still on the stalk, and by collecting and sowing the seeds, they almost inadvertently carried out a very early kind of genetic engineering: they slowly created the world's great staple crops - wheat and barley. With this more stable life, our ancestors turned to new gods, and they made images which show and celebrate the key elements in their changing universe; food, power, worship, sex and love. And the maker of the 'lovers' sculpture was one of these people.
一旦定居下来，人类就开始刻意收集一些谷物还长在茎秆上的植物，在这样收集与播种谷物的过程，他们几乎不经意地进行了一种非常早期的基因工程，慢慢地培育出世界伟大的主食农作物—— 小麦和大麦。以这种更加安逸的生活为基础，我们祖先开始了新的造神运动，他们创造出各种各样的形象，来展示与庆贺自身周围那日益改变的宇宙间关键元素：食物、权力、宗拜礼仪以及性爱。这件恋人雕塑的制造者，就是这些人类中的一员。
In the Manuscript Saloon at the British Museum, most people walk straight past the case that contains the statue of the lovers.
在大英博物馆的手稿展厅部分，大多数人民经过这对恋人雕像的展台时，都是视而不见般地擦身而过。
Perhaps it's because from a distance it doesn't look very much; it's a small, muted, greyish stone about the size of a clenched fist. But when you get nearer to it, you can see that it's a couple, seated, their arms and legs wrapped around each other in the closest of embraces. There are no clear facial features, but you know that these two people are looking into each other's eyes.
大概是因为远距离点来看，这件物品挺不起眼的。一枚灰不溜湫、大概握紧的拳头般大小的石头而已。然而当你走近点瞧瞧，这是一对男女，盘坐着，四肢交缠到对方身上，仿佛一对不可分离的鸳鸯鸟。他们没有明确的面部特征，但你可以知道他们肯定是彼此互望，深情款款。
I think it's one of the tenderest expressions of love that I know, comparable to the great kissing couples of Brancusi and Rodin, and I asked the contemporary British sculptor, Marc Quinn, what he thought of it:
我认为这是我心目中一种表达爱意最温柔的方式，堪比布朗库西与罗丹那些伟大的热吻中情侣的作品。我就此询问了英国当代雕塑家马克·奎恩的看法：
'It's incredible to be in the presence of this object, which is from so long ago. To me, what's incredible about this sculpture is that when you move it and look at it in different ways, it changes completely. And so here you have this thing - from the side, you have the long shot of the embrace, you see the two figures.
“这件作品年代居然这么久远，实在是令人难以置信。对我来说，更让人惊叹不已的是，当你转动这雕塑，从不同的角度来欣赏它时，呈现在你眼前的也绝然不同。从这个角度上，你看到双人相拥的侧面。
From another side it's a penis, from the other side a vagina, from another side it is breasts - it seems to be formally mimicking the act of making love as well as representing it. And those different sides unfold as you handle it, as you turn this object around in your hand - so they unfold in time, which I think is another important thing about the sculpture - it's not an instant thing.
从这面看，倒像是阴茎;转过来这面呢，像是阴道;转过来又出现了乳房——它似乎是很正式地在模仿性爱的动作，而不仅仅是代表这种行为。随着你转动角度的变化，不同的场景也在你面前一一呈现
You walk round it and the object unfolds in real time. It's almost like in a pornographic film, you have long shots, close-ups - it has a cinematic quality as you turn it, that you get all these different things and yet it's a poignant, beautiful object about the relationship between people.'
。你绕着这件作品走一圈，它的众多场景似乎是实时上演，几乎像在观看一部色情影片，长镜头、特写镜头——这种几乎接近电影质量给予你的是丰富的感受;这件美丽与感染力强烈的作品描述了人与人的关系。”
But what do we know of the people captured in this lovers' embrace? Well, the maker - or should we say the sculptor? - of the lovers, belonged to a people that we now call the Natufians, who lived in a region that straddled what is today Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, and our sculpture came from the area south-east of Jerusalem. In 1933 the great French archaeologist Abbé Henri Breuil and a French diplomat, René Neuville, visited a small museum in Bethlehem. Neuville wrote:
但我们还可以知道关于这对拥抱中恋人的什么东西呢?这件恋人作品的工匠，也许我们应该称之为雕塑家，来自于我们今天称之为Natufian人，大概定居在现今以色列、巴勒斯坦，黎巴嫩及叙利亚那个地域上，而我们这位雕塑家来自于取路撒冷东南部的某处。1933年杰出的法国考古学家兼神甫亚布·享利·布勒伊与一名法国外交官诺伊维尔参观在伯利恒地区的一座小型博物馆。诺伊维尔记录道：
'Towards the end of our visit, I was shown a wooden casket containing various items from the surrounding areas, of which none, apart from this statuette, was of any value. I realised immediately the particular significance of the design involved and asked the source of these objects. I was told that they had been brought by a Bedouin who was returning from Bethlehem towards the Dead Sea.'
“随着我们行程接近尾声，有人向我展示了一个长木盒，装有附近地区收集来的形形色色的物品，但除了这件雕像，其他都是一些毫无价值的物什。我立即意识到这件物品的特殊重要性，并询间它的出处。人家告诉我这盒物什是一个途径死海，从伯利恒回来的贝都因人带来的。”
Intrigued by the figure, Neuville wanted to know more about its discovery and he sought out the Bedouin he'd been told about. He managed to track down the man responsible for the find, who took him to the very cave - in the Judean desert not far from Bethlehem - in which the sculpture of the lovers had been discovered. The cave was called Ain Sakhri, and so these sculpted lovers that had so captivated Neuville are still known as the Ain Sakhri lovers.
对着物品浓厚的兴趣，驱使诺伊维尔去了解更多关于它的发现过程，于是他开始去打探人们所说的那位贝都因人的下落。最后他设法找到了最初发现这恋人雕塑的那个人。那人把他带到了当初雕塑出土的那个洞穴，位于伯利恒不远的朱迪亚沙漠。那个洞穴被称之为Ain Sakhri，所以那对让诺伊维尔着迷不已的拥抱中的恋人也便称之为Ain Sakhri恋人了。
Crucially, the sculpture had been found with objects which made it clear that the cave had been a dwelling rather than a grave, and so our sculpture must have played some kind of role in domestic everyday life.
更重要的是，出土这对恋人雕像的同一洞穴里还发现了其他的物品，明确显示了这洞穴曾经是处日常居住场所，而不是一处墓葬。因此我们这件雕像作品在当时人们的日常生活中肯定起到某种作用。
We don't know exactly what that role might have been, but we do know that this dwelling belonged to people who were living at the dawn of agriculture. Their new way of life involved the collecting and storing of food.
我们不知道它究竟曾经充当了什么实际角色，但我们知道这洞穴的主人生活的时代正值农业的曙光。他们崭新的生活方式包括了惧与储存食物。
Wild grass seeds fall off the plant and are spread easily by the wind or eaten by the birds, but these people selected seeds which stayed on the stalk - a very important characteristic if a grass is ever going to be worth cultivating. They stripped these seeds, removed the husks and ground the grains to flour. Later, they would go on to sow the surplus seeds. Farming had begun - and ever since, together we've been breaking bread.
野草种子通常从植物上脱落一来，然后轻易地通过风力传播，或者被鸟类吃掉，但是这些人类偏偏选择那些保留在谷物秆上的种子，这是决定某种农作物是否值得培育的重要一点。人类把这些种子采集、剥壳，然后把谷物碾磨成面粉。再后来，他们开始学会了把剩余的种子拿去播种。农业诞生了——并从那刻起，直到今天，我们仍然在烘烤面包。
The result was as profound a transformation for human beings as any revolution in history. This process of settling down did, of course, make you more vulnerable to a crop failure, pests, diseases, above all to the weather, but while things were good, society boomed.
这种结果与人类历史上任何一次革命性转变一样，产生的影响是极其深刻的。定居生活的过程中，确实使人类更加容易遭受各种威胁——谷物失收、虫灾、疾病等，几乎都由气候变化决定;然而遇上风调雨顺的好年头，人类社会就会蓬勃发展。
A guaranteed abundant food source fuelled a sustained population explosion, and people began to live in large villages of between two or three hundred - the highest concentration of people the world had yet seen. When your larder is stocked, the pressure is off and you've got time to think, and these rapidly growing, settled communities had the leisure to work out new social relationships and to contemplate the changing pattern of their lives.
这种很有保障的丰富食物来源成就了持续性的人口大爆炸，人们开始生活在两三百人组成的大村落里，这样的规模是史无前例的。当你家里的储藏架上填得满满的，压力便降低了，你开始有闲心进行思考;再加上生活在这快速发展、落户安居的村落里，人们也开始有闲心来培养出新的社会关系，并且认真地考虑关于他们生活模式的各种转变。
Our little sculpture of the entwined lovers may be a response to this new way of living - a different way of thinking about ourselves. What does it mean to depict the sexual act in this way, at this time? Archaeologist Ian Hodder, of Stanford University, has done a lot of work on this period and he sees here a process he calls the 'domestication of the mind':
我们这件缠绕紧拥的恋人小雕塑也许恰恰代表了这种崭新的生活方式，一种看顾人类自身的不同思维。在历史上这个时期，采用这种表现手法来描绘性爱行为，这究竟意味着什么呢?斯坦福大学的考古学家伊恩·霍德对这段历史时期研究颇深，他将这里观察到的现象称之为“心灵的驯化”过程：
'The Natufian culture is really before fully domesticated plants and animals, but you already have a sedentary society. And so, I think that this particular object, because of its focus on humans and human sexuality in such a clear way, is part of that general shift towards a greater concern with domesticating the mind, domesticating humans, domesticating human society, being more concerned with human relationships rather than on the relationships between humans and wild animals, and on the relationships between wild animals themselves.'
Natufian文化其实存在于人类完全驯化植物与动物之前，然而当时已经产生了一个定居社会。因此，我觉得因为这件特殊物品如此清晰地集中刻画出人类性行为，也反映人类心灵上驯化、身体上驯化、社会上驯化、过程中思维变迁的一种巨大转折;人们变得更加关注人与人之间的关系，而不是像以前一样，只关心那些人与野兽，野兽与野兽之间的关系。
As you hold the Ain Sakhri pebble and turn it round, what's striking is not just that there are clearly two human figures rather than one, but that it's impossible, because of the way the stone has been carved, to say which is male and which is female - could that generalised treatment, that ambiguity, have been a deliberate intention on the part of the maker?
当你把玩着这枚Ain Sakhri卵石，转过来转过去地观察，让人感叹的不仅仅是这是一件双人而非单人雕像，更重要的是从这石头雕刻的方式，根本就区分不清哪个是男，哪个是女。这种模糊处理，这种模棱两可性，当年雕塑家是否是有意而为之的呢?
We just don't know, but we don't know either how this little statue would have been used. Some scholars think it might have been connected with fertility, but Ian Hodder takes a different view:
我们无从知晓，同时我们也无法弄清这件小小雕像当年的真正用途。有些学者认为可能与生育有关，但伊恩·霍德采取不同的看法：
'This object is one that could be read in many ways, and I think that earlier on, one would have often thought that these notions of sexual coupling, and sexuality itself, were linked to ideas of the mother goddess, because it's been assumed that when you have the first farmers their main concern is the fertility of the crops.
“这物品显然可以有不同的诠释方式，而且我觉得在人类早期，很容易就可以把性爱及性行为本身与母系女神本身联系起来，因为大家都在觉得，当最早期的农耕人类出现了，自然而然的他们主要关心的使是农作物的生育能力。”
'My own view is in fact that the evidence is not really supporting this idea of a dominant mother goddess very early on, because there are now very exciting new discoveries that really have no representations of women at all - most of the symbolism is very, very phallocentric, so my view at the moment is that sexuality is important in these early farming societies, but not in terms of reproduction/fertility, children and mothering and nurturing - that sort of thing, it's really more clearly about the sex act itself.'
“我个人观点是，其实并没有充足证据来支持这种说法，能让我们认为在人类早期社会就有一位占主导地位的生育女神这种概念的存在，因为现在出土了很多振奋人心的新发现，然而强调女性形象的却几乎没有，其中绝大多数都阳性象征性非常强。因此，我目前的看法是，在那些早期农耕社会里，性行为是一种重要的概念，而非生育能力、子母关系或哺育后代等等。显而易见的这物品表现的是性行为本身。”
Certainly, to me, the tenderness of the embracing figures suggests not reproductive vigour, but love. People are beginning to settle and to form stable families, to have more food, and therefore more children, and perhaps this is the first moment in human history when a mate could become a husband or a wife.
当然对我而言，这柔情款款，缠绵悱恻的拥抱，强调的不是生育活力，而是在传达一种爱。当人类开始定居，并形成稳定的家庭，有了富余的食物，因此能够养育更多的孩子;也许就是在此刻的人类历史上，出现了配偶这种概念，丈夫与妻子。
All these ideas may be present in our sculpture of the lovers, but we're still largely in the realm of historical speculation. On another level though, it speaks to us absolutely directly, not as a document of a changing society but as an eloquent work of art. Sculptor Marc Quinn again:
也许以上可能性都在我们这对恋人雕塑中可以传达出来，然而我们如今还处于揣测历史的阶段。从另一层面而言，它的身份可以不是一件记录转变中社会的文件，而是一件杰出的艺术作品，与我们直接沟通。雕塑家马克·奎因再次说道：
'There's the difference between art and artefact. An artefact is something from a time that stays in that time like a piece of pottery and it becomes like a relic of that time.
“艺术品与人工制品之间存在着差异。人工制品来源于某个时代，停留于那个时代，像一件陶器，最终成为了属于它那个时代的遗迹。
An artwork is something that is from a time, but is also eternally in the present moment, and I think you can definitely say that this sculpture is in the present moment.
艺术品来源于某个时代，却能超越那个时代存活在当代，具有永怛的生命力。
That to me is the great strength of making artwork, you are making essentially emotional time-machines; you're making an object of meditation that will communicate with people in ten thousand years time (were it to survive) in a very direct way - I mean, certain things are beyond time.'
对于我而言，艺术品拥有一种伟大的艺术力量。是在创造一种本质上的情感时间机器，是在创造一种凝聚了思想的物品，即使经历万年漫漫时光，仍旧可以以非常直接的方式与人类进行构通。我的意思是，某种事物是可以超越时间的。”
But in a sense nearly all objects speak 'beyond time'. Throughout this series I'll be trying to discover the stories of the people whose hands made the objects - their fears, their hopes, sometimes even their loves. From the Ain Sakhri lovers to Rodin's statue of 'The Kiss' there are 11,000 years of human history, but not, I think, much change in human desire.
然而在某种意义上，几乎任何物品都可以“超越时间”来与我们对话。在本系列中，我将尝试去发现双手创造这些物品的人们的故事——他们的恐惧与希望，有时甚至是他们的爱。Ain Sakhri恋人与罗丹“吻”的雕像之间隔着一万一千前的悠悠岁月，然而我觉得人类的欲望却不曾怎么改变过。
In the next programme, we're on less romantic territory. I'm with the world's first cowboys, perhaps more accurately the world's first cattle herders, in Egypt, and with another statue - of four small cows.
在下期节目，我们将踏入并不怎么浪漫的新领域。我要去探索世界上第一位牛仔。也许更准确而言是在埃及的世界上第一位牧民，还有另一件雕像——四头小母牛。
