Egyptian Civilization Its Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology [Paperback]

L. a. Waddell (Author)

Book Description

Series: Kessinger Publishing's Rare Mystical Reprints | Publication Date: March 10, 2003

And Sumerian origin of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with 21 plates, 97 text illustrations and 2 maps. In spite of the advances in our knowledge of ancient Egypt, two basic questions of magnitude remain outstanding in as great uncertainty as in the days of Herodotus. These are the question of the origin of the civilization of the country, and the question of the dates of its kings and dynasties. The author attempts to answer these questions in this work.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC (March 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0766142736
• ISBN-13: 978-0766142732
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,771,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Believable, January 24, 2003

By 

Stephen E Franklin (Baltimore, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Egyptian Civilization: Its Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology (Hardcover)

Considering Waddell's use by the Christian Identity crowd and the neo-nazies in general, his theory that the first dynastic Pharaoh of Egypt, Menes, was identical to the son of Sargon the Great of Sumeria is surprisingly well thought out and supported by an amazing detail of argument. Perhaps the aforementioned loonies have not actually read him and base their support on his sometimes more than required use of the word "Aryan," which he equates with certain Mediterranean groups and only marginally the Nordic peoples of Northern Europe.

Waddell's main thesis is that a great empire extended from India in the east to Britain in the west and that it was ruled over by Sargon I and later by his son Manis Tusu, whom he equates with the Menes of the Egyptian king lists. The alignment of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Indian king lists is worth the price of admission by itself. If there is a fault with Waddell's writings, it is a consistent repeating of his statements in varying forms, as if the reader may have forgoten what he just said, but there does seem to be enough of a forward progression to keep one reading.

Anyone who feels threatened by the idea of ancient civilizations that were much more widespread and powerful than admitted by modern historians and anthropologists should avoid this work, but if you are curious about the interrelationships among the various dynastic kingdoms of the Old World, this is quite a good place to start. It is certainly readable and provides a fair amount of information you won't find anywhere else. You may just want to hold your nose when he starts theorizing on the origins of "Aryan" civilization, but that's a small price to pay for the enlightenment contained in his works.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is very interesting knowledge, August 20, 2010

By 

cjeangoode (TILLERY, NC, US) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Egyptian Civilization Its Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology (Paperback)

My son really enjoyed this book and the knowledge this writer bring forth is outstanding.

22 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An utter and stunning disaster, best read as a bad joke, June 3, 2005

By 

Bes Pantheos - See all my reviews

This review is from: Egyptian Civilization: Its Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology (Hardcover)

I felt compelled to write a review of this work upon reading Waddell's suggestion that the "true" history of what we now call the pre-dynastic period in Egypt has remained unknown to Egyptologists because of their "narrow" field of inetrest (Waddell himself possessing an honorary law degree, with no formal training in any of the languages or cultures- Sumerian, Egyptian, Indus Valley- he professes to set us straight on). Speaking as someone who *has* been formally trained in both the Egyptian and Sumerian languages, I felt a degree of responsibility to set the record straight about this truly abominable piece of so-called "scholarship."


To begin, I won't even dwell on the blatantly racist propaganda that informs all of Waddell's thesis ("white warrior-race" this, "blue-eyed conquering Aryans" that, etc., and ad nauseum) because it doesn't take much academic insight to recognize the stupidity of, for example, racially typing a highly-stylized, bas-relief portrait based on a "nose of non-Semitic type" (p. 86f., pl. 10). Instead, I would prefer to speak against the foundation of his argument: the supposed commonalities of script, and his "translations" of Egyptian, etc., material. First off, his ignorance of even the basic principles of linguistic change over time leads to many embarrassing false conclusions. To give but one example (and there are many, many more), a substantial part of his equation of the Egyptian king Menes with "Sargon the Great" (I won't even go into the chronological impossibility of this) and the Indian Manasyu is based upon the link he fabricates between a Sanskrit word, prabha, with Egyptian per-aa, "great house," which later comes to be equivalent with the king himself, and is familiar to pretty much everyone in its Greek form, "pharaoh." Using this equation, he translates a mythical Indian king's name from Sanskrit as "Manasyu of the line of prabhu ['pharaoh'], the royal eye of Gopta [Kopt or Egypt]" (brackets from original, p. 4). At the most basic level, per-aa, "great house," was simply the term for the royal administrative palace in the period under examination. It did NOT (yet) mean "the king." It did NOT (ever) mean the king's "line." These concepts are, at best, anachronistic to the tune of about FIFTEEN HUNDRED years, at worst, completely wrong. Stupid, stupid man...


Anyway, as much as I would relish going into even more gory philological detail, I will simply say that pretty much anything he gives as a "translation" of pre-dynastic or early dynastic Egyptian material is entirely, unquestionably, and demonstrably false. His treatment of Sumerian is only marginally better (at least *some* of the words are right), which I suppose is remarkable, given that our understanding of Egyptian grammar is, at present, considerably more fleshed out than that of Sumerian. Suffice it to say, his "Sumerian Origins of Egyptian Hieroglyphs" (pls. 21 ff.) is profoundly flawed by numerous antiquated sign readings, long-disproven identifications of sign forms, and a general lack of all but the shallowest surface-knowledge of either language. Let me stress the latter point: he gets it wrong from BOTH SIDES much of the time, and it is the simple, first-week-in-class stuff that trips him up. To wit: his equation of the the Sumerian "land" glyph, which he reads as "SAT," with the Egyptian (desert/hillcountry) land glyph, which he also calls "SAT, SAMT" (p. 162f, pl. 21) is patently false. The Sumerian sign can, in fact, carry the value SAT, but to understand it with a "land" value, it must be read as KUR. The Egyptian sign, on the other hand, is only associated with the consonatal skeleton s-m-t as a determinative/sense-sign (i.e. no phonological value), in reference to a necropolis or desert; when used phonetically, it is almost invariably read as KHAST. In other words, his suggestion fails on every conceivable level. And the examples could go on and on.

Suffice it to say, the few points I have briefly outlined above are representative of the very basic, yet very fundamental, errors made throughout this abhorrent piece of trash. The fact that it purports to be an authoratative piece of academic literature is apalling, and I can only advise any undergraduates who may be considering using it as a resource to run the other way, as quickly as possible. There is NO USEFUL INFORMATION in this work. None. If you enjoy reading failed experiments in scholarship as satire, farce, or tragedy, then this book will probably make you laugh out loud. I know I did. But if you are honestly interested in the early history of Sumer, the Indus Valley, or Egypt, then I strongly suggest checking out a book that wasn't written more than 75 years ago by a closet fascist, in the heady years prior to World War II, when this kind of nonsense was still considered fashionable. For its value as a text, I would give this book no stars whatsoever, but I suppose the one star minimum Amazon requires could be seen as a recommendation of Waddell's work as an insipid joke in extremely poor taste, masquerading as real research.