The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet - Couverture souple

Waddell, Laurence Austine

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1578989418 ISBN 13 : 9781578989416

Editeur : Martino Fine Books, 2010

Synopsis

2010 Reprint of 1927 First Edition. Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854 - 1938) was a British explorer, collector in Tibet, and author. He traveled in India throughout the 1890s (including Sikkim and areas on the borders of Nepal and Tibet) and wrote about the Tibetan Buddhist religious practices he observed there. In his later works he tried to synthesize Western and Near Eastern cultures. In this work he proposes an Aryan (i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet. His point of departure is the presumed Semitic origin of the Alphabet, against which he makes an argument for an actual Aryan origin. Illustrated in the text and with two large plates.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

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.

Biographie de l'auteur

Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854 to 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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Martino Fine Books
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1578989418
• ISBN 13: 9781578989416
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 96
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible