Waddell, L.A.
Full Name
Laurence Austine Waddell
Affiliation
Other Information
Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell[1] (1854 - 1938) was a British explorer, collector in Tibet, and author.
Waddell traveled extensively 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. Stationed with the British army in Darjeeling, Waddell learned the Tibetan language and even visited Tibet several times secretly, in disguise. He was the cultural consultant on the 1903-1904 British invasion of Tibet led by Colonel Sir Francis Edward Younghusband's, and was considered alongside Sir Charles Bell as one of the foremost authorities on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
In his later works he tries to synthesize Western and Near Eastern cultures, proposing among other things an Aryan (i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet and the appearance of Indo-European myth figures in ancient Near Eastern mythologies. The foundation of his argument is what he sees as a persistence of cult practices, religious symbols, mythological stories and figures, and god and hero names (based on etymology) throughout Western and Near Eastern civilizations. Source
Publications
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