Archaeology

◎英國大使館文化教育處

Archaeology is a long and difficult word.How do you say it?

ar - kee - ol - o - gy

Where does this word come from?

From Greek.It’s two words together, “ancient”, meaning very old, and“history”.

Why is it important then?

Well, it helps us to understand history.Ancient Egypt is a good example.We did not know much about this amazing culture before the 1800s.Then,archaeologists started studying the buildings and objects and now we know a lot about the ancient Egyptians.

How do they find out information from buildings and objects?

A good example is the Rosetta Stone, found in Egypt in 1799.This was an old piece of stone which had writing in two languages on it.People could read the Greek writing, but the other writing was from ancient Egypt.It used pictures, and nobody knew how to read it.But then they realised the Greek writing was a translation of the ancient Egyptian writing.

So they understood ancient Egyptian writing from this translation?

It took many more years before people could understand it because archaeologists had to study many more examples of Egyptian writing.But the translation on the stone helped a lot.About 32 years later an ancient Egyptian dictionary was published.Now many archaeologists can read this language and this helps them to learn even more about ancient Egyptian culture.

Activity 1 Read the conversation and choose the correct meaning of the words below.

1.stonea.make a piece of writing available to buy

2.realiseb.a hard object often found in nature

3.translationc.a piece of writing with the same meaning in two languages

4.publishd.begin to understand

Activity 2 Choose the correct answer.

1.The word “archaeology” comes from ______________________.

a.Greek b.Egyptian c.Latin

2.Before archaeologists studied ancient Egypt, ______________________.

a.we knew a lot about its culture

b.we knew nothing about its culture

c.we only knew a little bit about its culture

3.The Rosetta Stone ______________________.

a.has Greek writing on it

b.has ancient Egyptian writing on it

c.has Greek and ancient Egyptian writing on it

4.After the Rosetta Stone was found, ______________________.

a.archaeologists could read ancient Egyptian immediately

b.archaeologists had to wait many more years to read ancient Egyptian

c.archaeologists could understand Greek better