My Translation of Inscriptions using Waddell’s decipherment in his work ‘Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered’ (1925)
An article I have written on my work ‘The Rise of Man in the Gardens of Sumeria: a Biography of L. A. Waddell’ (2009) was posted on this website. In the illustrations are included drawings of the Seals I –XIX that Waddell claimed to have deciphered. They were reproduced in the biography from his work ‘Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered’ with permission from the Special Collections, at the University of Glasgow. Waddell is a forgotten scholar who claimed to have been able to decipher Sumerian, Egyptian, and Indus Valley inscriptions which no other scholar could. For this reason his work was particularly opposed by George A. Barton, a prejudiced Professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Pennsylvania who vehemently defended the view of the creation of civilization in the ancient Near-East at the hand of Semitic people because of his belief in the biblical version of it.
On the internet you can easily find an article posted on Tuesday May 4, 1999, that was written by the BBC News Online Science Editor Dr. David Whitehouse with a photo of a 5,500 year old fragment said to be of pottery unearthed at Harappa in the Indus Valley, with an inscription in the Indus Script. After explaining the difficulty with the latter Dr. Whitehouse reports that Dr Richard Meadow of Harvard University, the director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, told him the inscriptions would probably never be deciphered because the Indus Script has not been decoded and the Harappan language died out. As far as scholars are concerned, the situation is still the same 13 years later. Hundreds of attempts have been made to break the code of the Indus Script but they have been declared invalid. Scholars have produced theories and a lot of arguments about what the underlying language of the Indus Script was, but they seem to have avoided the option of treating the underlying language of the script as Sumerian.
Referring to the inscriptions on the pottery, a photo of which you can see below, Dr. Meadow stated to Dr. Whitehouse:
“So probably we will never know what the symbols mean.”
By comparison to Cuneiform the Indus Script was more cursive. Waddell found the task of deciphering the inscriptions a ‘comparatively easy one’ as he had studied the Sumerian language for 17 years. Some British scholars, as well as Marshall, recognised contacts had taken place between the Sumerians and the Indus Valley civilization, but later, Mortimer Wheeler’s conclusion that the underlying language of the Indus script was Dravidian (an Indian local language) eclipsed the earlier consensus. The underlying language was either proto-Dravidian or proto-Indo-Aryan (a precursor of Sanskrit).
Some scholars have suggested that the theories prevalent in the 1920s (the Sumerian hypothesis) should be reconsidered. The details of the arguments are very technical and academic so I shall not go into details.
Waddell discovered a lot about the Indus Valley civilization that has remained unknown to academics by his decipherment of the seals. I have discussed this in my Chapter Twelve ‘Findings about the Second Edin.’ Harappa was referred to in the Vedas as Hariyupiya. He found the name ‘Edin’ occurred a lot on the seals as ‘Udyana.’ He ascertained the Indus Valley was known in antiquity as the ‘land of Edin.’ It was an agricultural enterprise like the Mesopotamian Eden that is represented in Genesis as a ‘garden.’ The first Edin of the Sumerians was the ‘Gu-Edin Sanctuary’ of the patron sun-god of the Sumerians, a sacred site. Waddell ascertained that the god Indurru was Indara to the Hittites and Indra in Sanskrit. Seals IV and XV referred to the second Edin as the captured land of Edin. It makes sense!
‘Kaitisig’ was the name of a city and in Sumerian it was ‘khattesig’ but read as ‘patesi’ by Assyriologists. ‘Siga’ meant ‘city.’ ‘Khaiti-Siga’ was the ancient name of the capital of Edin. It also was ‘Hittite-city’ because the ‘k’ of ‘Khatti’ was dropped by scholars when they decided by which name to call the ancient ‘Hittites’ so ‘Khatti’ became ‘Hatti’ and ‘Hittite.’ The link here was Waddell’s theory of the Sumerians’ colonisation of the Indus Valley and the descent of proto-Hittites [from that area suspected to have been the biblical Eden] who became the ‘Sumerians’ (refer to my article on the biography I have written for Waddell which includes an Illustration showing a map of Cappadocia with the extension of the original territories acquired by Aryan invaders who descended from the north all the way down to the Persian Gulf). Waddell’s reading of ‘Khaiti’ as ‘Hittite’ is supported by the fact that seals similar to some found in Western Anatolia were excavated at a level above that of Harappa.
Scholars state that the Indus Script can’t be decoded, yet some of the seals were death amulets and appear to repeat the same prayers for departed souls, such as on Seal XIII:
‘SU-kha kha-As’ uk-gu gar gar gur gu-tum edin-as’
which Waddell deciphered as:
‘O setting Sun Fish, the sage Uggu the Gad, lift up from grave, bring to life, at Edin.’
The first two signs below the head of an animal on the seals discovered in Waddell’s time were for ‘Edin.’ He reasoned that the owners of the seals had to be the administrators and governors of a colony established after the Syrio-Phoenicians discovered gold in Tibet in about 3,100 BC because Vedic hymns state that the Indus Valley was exploited by the Marutas (Amorites) and Krivi (Syrio-Pheonicians) for its gold dust and medicinal plants.
There is a lot more to be said about Waddell’s findings but it is impossible here. I have selected the matter of ‘Khaiti-siga’ because the diamond and the V signs on the pottery found at Harappa and discussed by Dr. Meadow and Whitehouse can combine for that possible option (in Sumerian a sign does not translate into a letter but to a sound or an option of sounds – and this represents a difficulty in decipherment).
The diamond-like symbol without a dot inside it (on the second line) is pronounced SI(g) or SIGA (city) in Sumerian.
The V sign on the second line is KHAD, KAITI. It is the name of the ancient capital city.
With regard to the diamond sign with a dot in the middle (first line), it occurred on the seals unearthed in Waddell’s time. He commented that although the Phoenicians represented God with a dot inside a circle, the sign evolved into a non-cursive square shape because the material used to write on was harder. So it can be said that the diamond symbol with a dot in the middle is like the Sumerian one for SAR, or Indurru, meaning ‘All Perfect One’ although the Sumerian sign doesn’t have a dot.
The bar sign was also used by the Sumerians and was pronounced as ‘AS’ meaning ‘Lord.’
The double M sign (top line) is like the Sumerian one for M or Ma(t) meaning ‘dead one.’
The Y sign is like the Sumerian one, but reversed, read as TAR or TARSI meaning ‘look after.’
After reading Dr. Whitehouse’s article on the fragment discovered at Harappa, I consulted Waddell’s decipherment of the seals unearthed by Marshall and attempted to decipher its inscriptions with the information provided by Waddell. My reading is:
Ma(t) TAR AS SAR SI(g) KAITI
Literal: The Dead one/ look after/ Lord/ Indurru/ Kaiti
O Lord Indurru! Look after the dead one (buried in) Kaiti-city
Waddell stated that ‘Kaiti-siga’ was the ancient name for Harappa and the pottery (seal or amulet) was discovered at Harappa!