雙語+MP3|美國學生藝術史60 最古老的房子

 
 
60 THE OLDEST HOUSE最古老的房子
 
SOME men were talking about houses. “How old is your house?” one of them asked me. “Five years old,” I replied. “Well, my house is over a hundred years old,” said the man. “It’s in Massachusetts.” 
“Only a hundred years old!” exclaimed another man. “My house is two hundred years old. It’s in Virginia.” 
“That doesn’t seem old to me,” still another man said. “My house is four hundred and fifty years old.” 
Each one was trying to tell a bigger story than the other. 
“Four hundred and fifty years old!“ I cried. ”How can that be? That’s before America was discovered, before there were any white men’s houses in this country.” 
“It isn’t in America,” he replied. “It’s in England. I’m an Englishman.” 
“Oh, well, that’s different. If you count houses abroad, I’ve been in a house that’s a thousand years old. It’s a Church. It’s in France.” 
“Only a thousand years old?” The Englishman seemed bent on going me one better.“I’ve been in a house built two thousand years ago. It’s in Greece—a temple. They call it the Parthenon.” 
“Well,” said I，not to be outdone, “I can beat that. I’ve been in a house that is five thousand years old—a house built for the dead. It’s in Egypt. They call it a pyramid.” 
“You win,” said the Englishman. “No one can beat that.” 
And that’s true. The oldest houses in the world are the pyramids in Egypt——houses for the dead. But why are the oldest houses, houses for the dead? Where are the houses of the living—the houses they built five thousand years ago to live in? 
They’re all gone—long, long ago—and the reason is this: A man expected to live only fifty years or so and he built his house out of wood or mud bricks to last only as long as he lived, so the wood houses have all rotted away and the houses made of mud brick have turned back to dust. But he expected to be a long time dead, so if he were a king, he built a house for himself to be dead in and he built it so that it would last till Judgment Day. 
You see, the Egyptians, hundreds of years before Christ, believed in resurrection. They believed their dead bodies would sometime come to life again, so they built the pyramids out of stone to last till then, and they had their bodies embalmed—that is, made into what we call mummies—to last till then also. Now, the pyramids are still there in Egypt, but the mummies that were once in them are not in them any more. They have been stolen or have been taken away and put in museums—in museums for any one and every one to gaze upon, in spite of all the care that the tomb builder tool to have his body undisturbed till Judgment Day. We do not pay so much attention to how and where we are to be buried. Even kings and queens nowadays are buried in the ground with a monument over them or in a simple tomb. 
There were over a hundred pyramids built near the river Nile by Egypt’s rulers, but the largest is one built by King Cheops about three thousand years before Christ was born. That’s about five thousand years ago. The pyramid is almost five hundred feet high. It used to be four hundred and eighty, to be exact, but the top has been broken off and it is now only four hundred and fifty-one. In spite of that, it is by far the largest stone building in the world—a mountain of stone. 
The pyramid of Cheops is built of solid rock on a natural rock foundation, but as there was no rock near by for building the pyramid itself, it had to be brought from quarries some of which were fifty miles away and some five hundred miles away. Then it had to be dragged fifty miles or five hundred miles from the quarry. Some of the huge stones weighed more than a loaded freight car and it took several years to drag the rocks to the site of the pyramid. 
You see, there was no machinery in those days—no pulleys or derricks, no tracks or trucks, no engines or mechanical contrivances— such as we have nowadays to lift and carry huge loads, so that every block of stone had to be pushed or pulled by sheer brute force. Hundreds of men tugged from in front and hundreds shoved from behind. And then each block had to be lifted and moved into place. Probably a roadway was built right up the side of the pyramid to where the block could be slid into position. It is supposed to have taken twenty years to build Cheops’s pyramid and they say the king employed over a hundred thousand men to do the job. 
The outside of the pyramid when it was finished was smooth, polished stone— perhaps in bands of different colored granite, but long ago all this covering of polished stone was stolen and carried off to make other buildings, so that the sides of the pyramid are now rough, irregular steps, each one several feet high, and you can climb to the top on any side simply by climbing from one step to another. 
The Great Pyramid, as we call it, if it were sliced through the center like a piece of cheese, would show three small rooms one above the other and some slanting passageways to the three rooms. The rest would be solid rock. See the picture below. 
 
No.60-1　THE GREAT PYRAMID （大金字塔） 
The topmost room was for the king’s own mummy and in order to make sure that the weight of stone above would not crush through the room in which his mummy was, he had five ceilings of stone built, one above the other, with a space above each ceiling and then a slanting ceiling above them all. The two lines slanting upward from his room to the sides are small air passages. The room underneath his own was for his queen and the one under that, in the cellar or foundation of the pyramid was, perhaps, for nobody. That was for a while the great mystery of the Great Pyramid, but now we feel we have guessed the riddle. You see, there was only one passageway starting from the outside. From this one passageway another secret passageway led off to the king’s and queen’s chambers, but the passage that went straight ahead led down to the room that had nothing in it. Cheops was afraid that after he and his queen had been buried away in this tomb, some enemy of his might try to steal their mummies and so prevent them from coming to life again on Judgment Day. So he had all the passageways filled up with stone after he was buried and then the entrance covered so that no one could find where or how to get in. 
But Cheops figured that if some one did find the entrance and began to dig out the passageway down to the cellar, this straight passage would lead him off the track and he would keep on down and not see the other secret passageway leading off to the king’s and queen’s chambers. Then when he did reach the empty room, he would find nothing—an April fool joke. 
But in spite of all these extraordinary precautions that Cheops took to prevent any one’s finding his mummy, all these passageways and rooms were later discovered and opened and the mummies were removed—to where, by whom, no one knows—and that was a joke on Cheops. 
Though, as I told you, there are over a hundred pyramids, not all of them have the true pyramid form. That is, not all of them are triangular. In some pyramids the sides slope in very little at the bottom and then, as if the builder had changed his mind, they slope in faster toward the top. The Pharaoh who built his tomb like this may have been sick and afraid he was going to die before the pyramid was finished and so had to hurry up. In some of the pyramids the sides zigzag toward the top in several giant-like steps, Perhaps the Pharaoh just wanted to have his pyramid different from all the others. Some of the pyramids are built of brick instead of stone. Perhaps the Pharaohs who built such pyramids were poor. 
And so, the three greatest pyramids stand close together on the sands of the desert in giant majesty as they have stood for ages past and will for ages and ages to come, to thrill the beholder with their sublime grandeur. 
Mere size doesn’t make a thing beautiful. A big thing may be very ugly. But the pyramids are monuments to man’s attempt to make something enduring, lasting, and the builders succeeded in making the most permanent, lasting thing ever built by man. The pyramids are also monuments to their belief in a life after death. And when we think of the millions of people that have come and gone, lived and died, since these mighty monuments were built, and the countless millions that will come and go while the pyramids still stand on, it sets us thinking of the shortness of our little lives and the awesome length of eternity—and that is ART. 
 
No.60-2　TOMB AT BENI-HASAN （貝尼哈桑墓） 
Courtesy of The University Prints 
All the pyramids were tombs, but not all tombs were pyramids. That is—some tombs were not pyramid-shaped at all, but just stone buildings with flat tops. Furthermore, some tombs were simply caves cut into the rock cliffs on the west side of the Nile. These rock tombs were hollowed out on the west side of the river so that the entrance would face east, toward the rising sun. The Egyptians never faced their tombs any other way, for they thought the Sun God could not wake the dead on Judgment Day unless the tomb faced him as he rose in the east. If the tomb faced him he would wake these people who were dead, just as the rising sun shining into east windows wakes a sleeper in the morning. 
Here is such a rock-cut tomb—one of the most famous—a tomb at Beni-Hasan: 
It is particularly interesting because it has two colunms in front, two columns cut out of the selfsame rock. None of the pyramid tombs had columns. 
So these are the oldest houses in the world. Houses of the dead, Pyramids and tombs.