格罗佐文物宝窟的所有者逝世

DAWN springs up, and the plough-boy must be at work. So at first light on March 1st 1924 Emile Fradin, with his grandfather, harnessed the cows to till a field called Duranthon. A putain of a field, never ploughed before, strewn with rocks and slippy with clay sloping down into a ravine. The river Vareille flowed at the bottom, scraggy woods crowned the tops, in a four-house hamlet called Glozel in an unknown corner of the Allier 12 miles from Vichy in the very middle of France.

天一亮，耕童就要下地干活。所以，1924年3月1日那天破晓之时，埃米尔·弗拉金正和他的爷爷赶牛耕地，那块地叫作迪朗东。极其糟烂的一块地，以前从未被耕过，到处是石头，湿滑的粘土顺坡流进一个河谷。瓦雷耶河在谷底流淌，细瘦的树木盖着坡顶；这是一个只有四间房子、名叫“格罗佐”的村子，位于法国正中部，在阿列省的一处无名角落，离维希市12英里。

The field was all brambles, and the cattle struggled. One of them, Florence, stumbled into a hole, and the plough crashed sideways. But the hole, as Emile hauled the cow out, turned out to be an underground chamber containing axes, ceramic vases, strange scratched bricks and human bones. Emile smashed a few of the pots to see if there were coins inside; no luck. The glazed bricks that lined the chamber glistened in the sun.

地里满是荆棘，牲畜要奋力前行。其中一头牛叫作佛罗伦萨，它被一个洞给绊倒了，耕犁散到一边。但当埃米尔把牛拉出的时候，他发现这个洞其实是一个地下室，里面有斧头、陶瓷花瓶、刻着奇怪划痕的砖块、人的骨头。埃米尔打碎了几个罐子，想看看里面有没有钱币；没那运气。窖室内壁的砖上涂了秞，在阳光的照耀下闪闪发光。

Emile was 17 then, some years out of village school, with an early moustache and a ready, cheeky grin. By the time he was 25 he would have mixed with professors of prehistory and epigraphy from all over Europe, with the curator of the Louvre, with the premier archaeologists of France, and with the law. In his work-clothes and wooden sabots he watched the strangers come and dig his field, now renamed the Champ des Morts or Field of the Dead, from which in the end some 5,000 curious artefacts emerged. But the question that proved hardest to answer—over which students fought each other with stink-bombs, and butchers’ boys wrestled in the Paris streets—was whether this was a genuine ancient burial, Neolithic or even Paleolithic, or whether young Mr Fradin had forged the lot himself.

埃米尔那时17岁，刚刚离开村里的学校没几年，嘴上刚有些绒毛，总爱咧嘴笑。到25岁时，他会和全欧洲研究史前历史和碑文的教授打交道；此外，还有卢浮宫的馆长，还有法国第一流的考古学家，还有法律。他穿着干活的衣服，脚踏木鞋，看着陌生人来到这里挖他的地——现在改名叫作“逝者之地”，那里最后一共出土了约5000件珍奇的人工制品。但是问题是——一个被证明很难回答的问题——学生们为了这个问题会以臭气弹相向，屠夫的孩子会在巴黎街头摔起跤来——这是否确是古时的墓葬之地，是新石器时期的？亦或甚至是旧石器时期的？或者只是小埃米尔自己伪造的。

A mysterious alphabet

神秘的字母泥板

The finds were hugely intriguing. Visitors to Mr Fradin’s museum, admission four francs, would find—will still find—masks and carvings of faces without mouths; bones pierced with holes, with the sun’s rays scratched round them; ceramic pots, schist rings, polished stones. Some figures were hermaphrodite idols, with phalluses in their foreheads. Several bone carvings showed reindeer running, though reindeer were thought to have died out in that part of France 10,000 years earlier. But most exciting were the dozens of square clay tablets inscribed with letters which, if Neolithic, predated by many millennia the Phoenician characters from which Western alphabets were supposed to have come—making Glozel, not the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilisation.

这些发现极其引人入胜。到弗拉金的博物馆参观的访客（门票4法郎）会找到——现在仍会找到——没有嘴的面罩和脸部雕刻品；穿着洞的骨头，洞周围划着太阳光线；陶罐、片岩制成的圆环、磨光的石头。有些供膜拜的神像是雌雄同体，阳物长在前额。几块骨头上刻有驯鹿奔跑的图画，尽管法国的这块区域上的驯鹿被认为在一万年前就消失了。但是最让人兴奋的是十几块方方正正的泥板，上面刻着字母——如果这些泥板来自新石器时代，那么上面的文字就要比腓尼基字母早好几千年，而西方的这套字母被认为源自腓尼基字母——于是，西方文明的摇篮就从中东变到了格罗佐。

This extraordinary argument came originally from Antonin Morlet, a Vichy doctor and amateur archaeologist who took over the excavation. Emile had enlisted him, cycling over the hills to fetch him, because his father was threatening to plant the field. Dr Morlet paid the Fradins 200 francs a year to dig there, and wrote articles about the finds in Emile’s name as well as his own. Emile thus became a scholar by association, signing his name with stylish swagger, though snobbish Parisians still thought him an “insolent” peasant boy.

这个离奇论述最早来自安东·莫雷——维希的一位医生和业余考古学家，他接手了挖掘工作。是埃米尔把他争取来的，而且是骑自行车翻山越岭把他接到的这里。埃米尔之所以这么做，是因为他爸爸说要在这块地上种庄稼。莫雷付给弗拉金一家一年200法郎的挖掘费，而且在自己撰写的关于这里考古发现的文章中与埃米尔联合署名。埃米尔于是成了一个名义上的学者，而且用当时时髦的夸张风格来签名，但是势利的巴黎人仍然把他看作是一个“粗野的”乡下男孩。

Between 1926 and 1928 Dr Morlet brought in professionals. Some, including a committee of experts, thought the site was certainly Neolithic, though with a baffling admixture of Iron Age, Roman and medieval remains. Others dismissed it out of hand. Emile stuck to his story. When the curator of the Louvre mocked him he sued him for defamation, David against Goliath. When police, tipped off by the president of the French Prehistoric Society, raided his farmhouse-museum, carrying away even the saucepans in which his little brother had been mixing dirt, he yelled at them and was beaten for it. He was accused of creeping out at night to bury fresh-scratched stones, but no one proved it. He was formally charged with fraud, but all the charges were dismissed.

1926-1928年期间，莫雷带来了专家。有些专家——包括一个专家委员会——认为这很显然是新石器时期的遗址，尽管还令人不解地混有铁器时代、罗马时期和中世纪的物品。其他人马上就摒弃了新石器之说，而埃米尔却坚守自己的说法。卢浮宫馆长嘲笑他，他就控告他诽谤，好似大卫对决哥利亚。警察抄了他的农场博物馆（法兰西史前史学会会长报的信），甚至带走了他弟弟混土的平底锅，他于是向他们吼叫，还因此挨打。他被指控半夜偷偷出来埋下那些石头，而且上面的划痕都是新弄上的，但是没人可以证明这点。他还被正式指控欺诈，但是所有的指控都被驳回。

The chief of the Criminal Records Office in Paris, inspecting the alphabet tablets in 1928, said he found fresh grass in them, as well as apple stems and fibres from 20th-century clothes. But in 1982 a Swiss scholar thought the tablets and the letters came from Celtic times. Thermo-luminescence testing in 1973 suggested dates anywhere from 300BC to 1300ad; carbon-dating ranged from the 5th to the 15th century; the Ministry of Culture, in a curt résumé of 1995, concluded that the site was medieval. Mr Fradin sat tight, knowing that despite the improbabilities of the site—so much, from so many ages, all jumbled in one field—each piece that was declared genuinely old solidified his reputation. In 1990 he was awarded the Ordre des Palmes Académiques for his discovery. Though argument still raged, and continues to rage online, he felt vindicated.

1928年，位于巴黎的犯罪记录办公室的主任检查了那些印有字母的泥板，说在当中找到了青草，还有苹果枝，还有20世纪的衣服纤维。但到了1982年，一个瑞士学者认为这些泥碑和字母来自凯尔特时期。1973年的光热测试认为泥碑所处时期可以在公元前300年到13世纪之间的任何时候；碳测定法的结果是5世纪到15世纪之间；法国文化部在1995年的一份简报中给出结论，认为这处遗址是中世纪的。弗拉金则静观事态发展，他知道尽管这不太可能是一处遗址——这么多年代的这么多东西全都混杂到一处——但是每一件宣布的文物真品都巩固了他的名誉。1990年，他因为自己的发现被授予棕榈勋章。尽管争论之声依然热烈，一直吵到了网络时代——网上接着论战，但是他感到对他的冤枉已经大白。

He never sold a single item of the 5,000, though many people asked, and the money would have helped a farmer with a family. He kept the objects safe in their glass cases, some reverently laid on red cloth.

5000件的物品，他一件也没出卖，尽管许多人都要买，而且这些钱能让一个农民家庭更宽裕。他把这些东西每件都安放在各自的玻璃盒子里，有些下面还虔诚地铺着红布。

As for the field called Duranthon, he never ploughed it. It is archaeology that has broken up the hummocky ground. And only more impartial digging will resolve the mystery of Glozel. The misty March trees survey the ghosts of bone-men, Romans, Celts, medieval farmers, archaeologists in straw hats; and the young Emile Fradin, urging his team towards the secrets of the dead.

至于那块叫作迪朗东的土地，他再也没有耕过。考古挖掘已经把这块多丘的土地毁掉了。而且还需要更多的挖掘才能弄清格罗佐之谜。迷雾中的三月树审视着逝者的幽魂，看着罗马人、凯尔特人、中世纪的农民、带草帽的考古学家——出现，消失；还有年轻的埃米尔·弗拉金，他正在督促他的队伍挖掘逝者留下的谜团。