纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 069瓦斯特克女神雕像（8）

 

So it's pretty hard to come to any firm view about our statue's meaning, and now some scholars are even questioning whether she's a goddess at all. Back to the evidence we have got - the statue in the gallery. Her most striking feature is a huge, fan-shaped head-dress. It's about ten times the size of her head, and although part of it's broken off, you can see that, like the rest of her, it's conceived as an assemblage of geometric shapes. In the middle, resting directly on her head, is a plain oblong slab¹. Sitting on that, an unadorned cone², and both are framed in a great semi-circle of what look like stone ostrich³ feathers. They may be feathers, they may be bark-wood, but the original paint that would have let us know has long gone. A head-dress like this must have been a totally unambiguous statement of who this figure was. Maddeningly, it's a statement that we cannot read now with any confidence. The Aztec expert Kim Richter gives us her more secular⁴ understanding of the statue:

因此，我们很难得出这尊女神雕像的真正含义，一些学者甚至质疑她的女神身份。那么，她身上还有什么其他蛛丝马迹吗？

这尊雕像最引人注目的是她的巨大扇形头饰，几乎是她头部的十倍大，虽然已部分损毁，但可以看到，它和她的身体一样，是通过几何图形来表现的。头部正上方顶着一片倾斜的平板，其上是一个同样没有任何装饰的圆锥体，这些都被包围在一组如鸵鸟羽毛的石刻半圆中。究竟是羽毛还是树皮，由于其色彩早已脱落，我们无从得知。也许这样的头饰曾是一目了然的身份证明。令人恼火的是，如今我们已无法从中得到任何确凿的信息。

瓦斯特克专家金·里克特给出了更为世俗的理解：

1 slab   

n.平板，厚的切片；v.切成厚板，以平板盖上

参考例句：

• This heavy slab of oak now stood between the bomb and Hitler.这时笨重的橡木厚板就横在炸弹和希特勒之间了。
• The monument consists of two vertical pillars supporting a horizontal slab.这座纪念碑由两根垂直的柱体构成，它们共同支撑着一块平板。

2 cone   

n.圆锥体，圆锥形东西，球果

参考例句：

• Saw-dust piled up in a great cone.锯屑堆积如山。
• The police have sectioned off part of the road with traffic cone.警察用锥形路标把部分路面分隔开来。

3 ostrich   

n.鸵鸟

参考例句：

• Ostrich is the fastest animal on two legs.驼鸟是双腿跑得最快的动物。
• The ostrich indeed inhabits continents.鸵鸟确实是生活在大陆上的。

4 secular   

n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的

参考例句：

• We live in an increasingly secular society.我们生活在一个日益非宗教的社会。
• Britain is a plural society in which the secular predominates.英国是个世俗主导的多元社会。