纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 044辛顿圣玛丽肖像(1)（在线收听）

I'm walking with the gods-I'm in the gallery that's got objects from the time when Britain was part of the Roman Empire,around 1,700 years ago.

我正穿梭于众神当中，大英博物馆中有一个展厅专门陈列约1700年前不列颠处于罗马帝国统治时期的文物，其中有一系列神像：

Here is Mars, there's Bacchus with his wine cup, Pan piping on a silver dish... and now I've arrived at what looks like another pagan god, this time in mosaic.

一个小型战神马尔斯，一个端着酒杯的酒神巴克科斯，一个在银盘上吹笛子的潘神，还有一个看起来也像是某个异教神的马赛克图案。

It's a shoulder-length portrait.

这是一幅齐肩人像,

He's roughly life-size, clean shaven, has fair hair swept back, and he's wearing a tunic and a robe tightly wrapped around his shoulders.

大小相当于真人，画中人的胡子剃得很干净，金色的头发往后拢着，穿着束胸外衣，长袍紧裹肩头。

But which god is this?

但这是哪路神明？

There's a clue, because this is a man with a monogram.

有一个线索,因为有个字母能够揭示他的身份。

Behind his head are the two Greek letters chi and rho and that tells me at once who he is, because they're the first two letters of the word Christos, and this is in fact Christ.

在他头部后方还有两个希腊字母chi和rho,这让我们立刻了解了这名男子的身份：这是希腊文“christes”的首字母，而我们所看到的正是耶稣最早的图像之一。

It's one of the earliest images we have of him anywhere, and it's an astonishing survival-made not for a church in the eastern Mediterranean or in Imperial Rome, but for the floor of a villa in Dorset, somewhere around the year 350.

它并非东地中海或罗马帝国的某座教堂的物品，而是公元350年前后多塞特某座别墅的地板装饰，能留存至今极为不易。