Book Reviewed: The Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered by L.A. Waddell

Tracing the roots of the culture of Indus Valley Civilization

Laurence Waddell, a British explorer and an archaeologist studied the Sumerian and Vedic culture and history. He made numerous translations of ancient artifacts and interpreted the seals, inscriptions, and amulets of Indus Valley, Tibet and Sumeria. In this book he concludes that the ancestors of Vedic Aryans came from Sumeria. He also observes that the Greek, Romans and the Europeans have common ancestral relationship with Sumerians. The author suggests that the parent Indo-European language belongs to the Near East. He observes a commonality in the cultural practices, religious beliefs, polytheism, nature worship and the deciphered Sumerian and Indus-Valley seals, and other archaeological findings.

Waddell also found some similarities with the names of Vedic kings, princes and seers to the names inscribed on the Sumerian seals. And some of them were specified as living on the banks of the Indus River. He also makes an interesting observation that the ancient Vedic society wrote and spoke in the "Sumerian” tongue, a language which is now known to be the parent Indo-European language, and its offspring includes Sanskrit and European languages. Another key feature of his observation was that temples served as cultural, religious, and political headquarters until approximately 2500 BCE in Sumeria. The priests were ranked very highly in the community but below the ruling class. This practice is also evident in Rig-Veda. Early Sumerian myths were also passed down through the oral tradition until the invention of writing. The religious writings became prevalent much later as temple praise hymns. The author discusses the Sumerian origin of the Sun-worship, and suggests similarities of Sumerian gods with Vedic deities such as Vishnu, Sarasvati and Sun. The Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, the religion of the Indo-Iranian people, prior to the earliest Hindu and Zoroastrian scriptures is the link between Sumeria and Vedic India. These two faiths share a common inheritance of concepts including the universal force of Rig-Veda and Avesta. The religious practices diverged as cultures separated and evolved. The cosmology and connections with forces of nature (gods) on the Central Asian steppes, the Persian plateau and Indus Valley progressed into more scripture-based and religion-oriented belief systems.

In recent years, multidisciplinary studies in archeology, anthropology, genetics, classical philology and linguistics have shed much light into the origins of Indo-Europeans and the parent Indo-European language from two distinct groups of people; the hunter-gatherers, and the farmers/pastoralists. In the beginning, the ancient populations in Europe and Asia were divided into individual archaeological cultures with distinctive types of pottery and cultural practices associated with burials and settlements. With the advent of genetics and genome sequencing, the different groups could be reconciled with genome data that explains the origin and migrations of ancient people in Eurasia. This in turn also explain the source of the parent Indo-European language that resulted in diverse languages in Europe and Asia.

Author Laurence Waddell made very bold predictions for his time in 1920s and some of his interpretations are not far off based on what we know about the origin of early Indo-European culture and languages. This book is available free of charge for download at the following address: https://archive.org/details/TheIndo-sumerianSealsDeciphered1925