Rise of Man in the Gardens of Sumeria

Preston, Christine:
The Rise of Man in the Gardens of Sumeria : a biography of L. A. Waddell / Christine Preston. - Brighton ; Portland, Or. : Sussex Academic Press, 2009. - xiii, 260 S. : Ill., Kt.
ISBN 978-1-84519-315-7
£ 55,00 / US$ 85,00
DDC: 920.041

Beschreibung
Lieut.-Col. Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938) was a British Army officer with an established reputation mainly due to a work on the 'Buddhism' of Tibet, his explorations of the Himalayas, and a biography which included records of the 1903-4 military expedition to Lhasa (Lhasa and its Mysteries). Waddell was also in the limelight due to his acquisition of Tibetan manuscripts which he donated to the British Museum. His overriding interest was in 'Aryan origins'. After learning Sanskrit and Tibetan, and in between military expeditions together with Col. Younghusband, and gathering intelligence from the borders of Tibet in the Great Game, Waddell researched Lamaïsm. He extended his activities to Archaeology, Philology and Ethnology, and was credited with discoveries in relation to Buddha. His personal ambition was to locate records of ancient civilization in Tibetan lamaseries.
   ... Waddell is little known as an archaeologist and scholar, in contrast with his fame in the Oriental field, due to the controversial nature of his published works dealing with 'Aryan themes'. Waddell studied Sumerian and presented evidence that an Aryan migration flee- ing Sargon II carried Sumerian records to India. He interrupted his comparative studies of Sumerian and Indian king-lists to publish a work on Phoenician origins and decipherment of Indus Valley seals, the inscriptions of which he claimed were similar to Sumerian pictogram signs cited from G. A. Barton's plates, which are reproduced in this volume.
   ... Waddell's life is reconstructed from primary sources, such as letters from Marc Aurel Stein at the British Museum and Theophilus G. Pinches, held in the Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library. Special attention is paid to the contemporary reception of his theories, with the objective of re-evaluating his contribution; they are contrasted to past and present academic views, in addition to an overview of relevant discoveries in Archaeology. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
List of Illustrations. vii
Preface. ix
Acknowledgements. xiv
Introduction: The Controversial Scholar. 1
PART I: THE ARYAN QUEST
   1. Quest and Career - A Tour of the Himalayas. 25
   2. Excavations in Pataliputra, 1895-1903. 46
   3. Quest for Manuscripts in Lhasa, 1903-1904. 51
PART II: THE RISE OF MAN
   4. Sumerian, Decipherment, and 'Shinar'. 73
   5. Decoding the Dragon and Rise of Man (The British Edda). 87
   6. The Phoenician Origin of the Britons. 117
   7. Identification of the first Sumerian Dynasty. 128
   8. Ur-Nina, Ruler of the Gardens of Sumeria. 142
   9. Menes was Sumerian. 153
PART III: THE SECOND GARDEN OF SUMERIA
   10. Archaeology of the Indus Valley Civilization. 161
   11. Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered. 167
   12. Findings about the 'Second Edin'. 178
   13. Decipherment of the Seals. 187
Epilogue: The Forgotten Scholar. 194
APPENDIXES. 197
   I. Introduction by Professor S. Langdon to G.R. Hunter's Abstract. 197
   II. Waddell's letter re Shinar. 198
   III. Waddell in the Special Collections. 199
   IV. Undated draft by Waddell in response to Julian S. Huxley and A.C. Haddon's commentary in We Europeans (1935). 200
   V. Full titles of works by Waddell with a common Aryan theme. 201
Illustrations. 202
Notes. 211
Bibliography. 231
Index. 254

Autorin
CHRISTINE PRESTON is a Researcher in the Classics and Ancient History Department, University of Swansea. She is a translator and the author of Scramble for Katanga - an historical review on the colonisation of the Congo. In the process of researching the origin of Indo-European languages she came across L.A. Waddell's The British Edda, which led her to write this biography. Her current research focuses on the Archaeology of the Indus Valley civilization; Aryan and Sumerian controversies; and decipherment of Indus Script.

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