巴黎一家医院地下挖出两千年前的古墙：巴黎可能就是从这里开始的

Where exactly did Paris begin?

It sounds like a simple question, but French scholars have been arguing about it for decades.

Recently, an old wall dug up beneath a hospital has, for the first time, begun to make the answer clear.

The hospital is the Hôtel-Dieu, on the Île de la Cité in the heart of Paris.

The Île de la Cité is a small island in the middle of the Seine; Notre-Dame Cathedral stands on it too.

This summer, work began underground to shore up the hospital building.

Archaeologists on the site discovered this wall.

It's about twenty-two meters long, built of stone and wood, and next to it lay a Gallic spearhead.

Experts say this kind of wall is a typical defensive structure of the Gauls in the late Iron Age.

The Iron Age ended around the first century BC.

In a statement on Wednesday, French culture minister Catherine Pégard said it was one of the most important archaeological finds for understanding Gallic-era Paris.

To see why this matters, we have to go back more than two thousand years.

Back then, Paris wasn't called Paris; its Latin name was Lutetia.

It was built by a Gallic tribe living along the Seine, who may have settled here as early as the fourth century BC.

From 58 BC to 50 BC, the Romans fought a series of wars against the Gallic tribes, known to history as the Gallic Wars.

The Roman general Julius Caesar later wrote a book about them.

In it, he said Lutetia was a town of the Parisii, built on an island in the Seine.

He also wrote that when the Gauls heard the Roman army was coming, they ordered Lutetia set on fire and cut down the bridges leading into the town.

In 52 BC, the Romans took the town.

The trouble is that Caesar's account is vague, and archaeology had never turned up any proof.

So where the Gallic town actually stood was debated for a long time in French academia.

Many doubted it was in what is now central Paris at all.

Some scholars, citing 1990s finds in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, argued that Lutetia was really in Nanterre.

Matthieu Poux, an archaeology professor at the University of Lyon II, says he thought so too at the time.

He says the evidence in the 1990s was really very scant, so he wrote that Lutetia probably wasn't on the Île de la Cité.

But this wall has changed his mind.

He says he now has no doubt at all that the ancient town was on the Île de la Cité.

Why is he so confident?

First, preliminary carbon dating of wood in the wall shows it was built between 200 BC and 10 BC.

That's exactly the period Caesar wrote about.

Second, the wall bears traces of fire.

The culture ministry says charred seeds and the remains of a burned wooden building were also dug up at the site.

This may well match the passage in Caesar: the Gauls set fire to their own town before the Romans arrived, and then fled.

Still, the culture minister stressed that more research is needed to confirm what the wall was for and exactly when it was built.

In fact, archaeologists already know a lot about Roman-era Paris.

Many Roman artifacts have been found beneath today's Latin Quarter.

A Roman residential area was also found under the Luxembourg Gardens, about a mile south of the Île de la Cité.

But Gallic-era Paris was almost a complete blank.

Professor Poux says this single excavation has multiplied the data on the period tenfold.

He believes it could be the starting point for a series of new discoveries on the island.

But he also cautions that digs on the island can only follow the pace of renovations to old buildings, so progress will be slow.

The culture ministry says more digging will take place nearby, and the whole wall will eventually be moved out for study and display.

Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said the city will share this heritage with Parisians and with everyone who loves the city.

A city's earliest form is often hidden under the streets people walk every day.

If someone in your city dug up a two-thousand-year-old wall, what's the first thing you'd want to know?