Description
By L. A. Waddell. Building upon his earlier works in which he proved a racial link between the Indo-Europeans in Europe and ancient Sumeria, in this work the author shows that the modern alphabet used in Europe (and thus most of the world) originated with a Proto-Indo-Hittite script which developed into Sumerian.
This was then in turn transmitted to surrounding civilizations and ultimately became the written language of Western civilization.
“The origin of our Alphabet and Alphabetic Writing—one of the greatest and most useful of human inventions—has long been the subject of countless conjectures, but has hitherto remained wholly unsolved. The new evidence now discloses by concrete proofs that unknown origin, the meaning of the letters or signs, the objects that they represent with their original names and meanings, and their racial authorship, which is found to be not Semite, as hitherto supposed, but Aryan.
“The inventor of the alphabet is traced to the leading mercantile and seafaring branch of the ruling Aryans or Sumerians, namely, the Hitto-Phoenicians; and his personality appears to found in King Cadmus, the Phoenician sea-emperor of about 1200 BC, after whom the Greeks named their early alphabetic letters.
“The effect, therefore, of these constructive discoveries is destructive of the current established theories of modern historians and philologists on the racial origin of the Higher Civilization and of civilized writing, both hieroglyphic and alphabetic. It thus necessitates a new re-orientation of the facts of Ancient History and of the History of our Modern Civilization.”—From the conclusion.
Contents:
I: Ancestry of the Alphabets re the Phœnicians
II: Alphabetic Letters in Pre-Dynastic and Early-Dynastic Egypt and Theories Thereon
III: How the Sumerian Origin of the Alphabet Was Discovered
IV: The Alphabetic Vowel and Consonantal Signs in Sumerian Writing
V: The So-Called “Aphonic Owner’s Mark” Signs Of Pre-Dynastic and Early-Dynastic Egypt Are Sumerian Linear Pictograms
VI: Comparative Alphabetic Tables Showing Sumerian Origin & Evolution of the Alphabetic Letters
VII: Individual Letters and Their Evolution from Sumerian Parents
VIII: Names of the Letters and Objects Pictured
IX: Order of the Alphabet or “Abc” and Numeral Value of Letters
X: Authorship of the Alphabetic System and Date
XI: Some Historical Effects of the Discoveries.
Completely reset. Contains all original plates and figures.
About the author: Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854–1938) was a Professor of Tibetan, Professor of Chemistry and Pathology, a British army surgeon, and an explorer who travelled widely in India, Nepal and Tibet. He was also a philologist and linguist and one of only a few scholars able to fully translate Sumerian and Sanskrit—a skill for which he won great renown.
80 pages. Paperback.
