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  3. Alexander the Great’s conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean initiated a series of profound cultural transformations in the anci

Alexander the Great’s conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean initiated a series of profound cultural transformations in the anci

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问题    Alexander the Great’s conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean initiated a series of profound cultural transformations in the ancient centers of urban civilization of the Fertile Crescent. The final destruction of native rule and the imposition of an alien elite culture instigated a cultural discourse — Hellenism — which irrevocably marked all participants, both conquerors and conquered. This discourse was particularly characterized by a transformation of indigenous cultural traditions, necessitated by their need to negotiate their place in a new social order. As Bowerstock has argued, the process of Hellenization did not accomplish the wholesale replacement of indigenous cultural traditions with Greek civilization. Instead, it provided a new cultural vocabulary through which much pre-existing cultural tradition was often able to find new expression. This phenomenon is especially intriguing as it relates to language and literacy. The ancient civilizations of the Syro-Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultural spheres were, of course, literate, possessing indigenous literary traditions already of great antiquity at the time of the Macedonian conquests. The disenfranchisement of traditional elites by the imposition of Greek rule had the related effect of displacing many of the traditional social structures where in indigenous literacy functioned and was taught—in particular, the institutions of the palace and the temple. A new language of power, Greek, replaced the traditional language of these institutions. This had the unavoidable effect of displacing the traditional writing systems associated with these indigenous languages. Traditional literacy’s longstanding association with the centers of social and political authority began to be eroded.
   Naturally, the eclipse of traditional, indigenous literacy did not occur overnight. The decline of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic literacies was a lengthy process. Nor was the nature of their respective declines identical. Akkadian, the ancient language of Mesopotamian court and temple culture, vanished forever, along with cuneiform writing, in the first century CE. Egyptian lived on beyond the disappearance of hieroglyphic in the fourth century CE in the guise of Coptic, to succumb as a living, spoken language of daily social intercourse only after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Even then, Coptic survives to this day as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. This latter point draws attention to an aspect of the decline of these indigenous literacies worthy of note: it is in the sphere of religion that these literacies are often preserved longest, after they have been superseded in palace circles—the last dated cuneiform text we have is an astrological text; the last dated hieroglyphic text a votive graffito. This should cause little surprise. The sphere of religion is generally one of the most conservative of cultural subsystems. The local need to negotiate the necessities of daily life and individual and collective identity embodied in traditional religious structures is slow to change and exists in ongoing dialogue with the more readily changeable royal and/or state ideologies that bind various locales together in an institutional framework.
   The process of "Hellenization" of the ancient cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean provides us, then, with an opportunity to observe the on-going effect on traditional, indigenous literacy of the imposition of a new status language possessed of its own distinct writing system. The cultural politics of written and spoken language — use in such contexts has been much discussed and it is clear that the processes leading to the adoption of a new language — in written form, or spoken form, or both — in some cultural spheres and the retention of traditional languages in others are complex. Factors including the imposition of a new language from above, adoption of a new language of social prestige from below, as well as preservation of older idioms of traditional status in core cultural institutions, must have affected different sectors of a conquered society in different fashions and at different rates.
Which aspect of society, according to the passage, is one of the most resistant to change?
选项 A、Monarchical institutions.
B、Religious institutions.
C、Linguistic norms.
D、State ideologies.
答案B
解析 根据第二段中的“Even then，Coptic survives to this day as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church．”可知，即使如此，科普特语至今仍为科普特东正教堂的礼拜仪式语言。据此可知，B项“宗教机构”正确。
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