Laurence Waddell - Professor of Pathology of Calcutta Medical College who was Indiana Jones in real life!

Lieutenant Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell, CB, CIE, F.L.S., L.L.D, M.Ch., I.M.S. RAI, F.R.A.S (1854–1938) was a British explorer, Professor of Tibetan, Professor of Chemistry and Pathology, British army surgeon, collector in Tibet, and amateur archaeologist. Waddell also studied Sumerian and Sanskrit; he made various translations of seals and other inscriptions. His reputation as a Assyriologist gained little to no academic recognition and his books on the history of civilization have caused controversy. Some of his book publications however were popular with the public, and he is regarded by some today to have been a real-life precursor of the fictitious character Indiana Jones.

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, and was considered alongside Sir Charles Bell as one of the foremost authorities on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Waddell studied archaeology and ethnology in-between his military assignments across India and Tibet, and his exploits in the Himalayas were published in his highly successful book Among the Himalayas (1899). Various archaeological excavations were also carried out and supervised by Waddell across India, including Pataliputra, of which he did not receive recognition of discovery until long after his death, in 1982, by the government of Bengal. His discoveries at Pataliputra were published in an official report in 1892.

During the 1890s Waddell specialised in Buddhist antiquities and became a collector, between 1895-97 he published "Reports on collections of Indo-Scythian Buddhist Sculptures from the Swat Valley", in 1893 he also read a paper to the International Congress of Orientalists: "On some newly found Indo-Grecian Buddhistic Sculptures from the Swat Valley".In 1895 Waddell published his book Buddhism of Tibet or Lamaism, which was one of the first works published in the west on Buddhism. As a collector, Waddell had come across many Tibetan manuscripts and maps, but was disappointed to not find a single reference to a lost ancient civilization, which he had hoped to discover.

Waddell continued his military service with the Indian Medical Service. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901), including the Relief of Peking in August 1900, for which he was mentioned in despatches, received the China War Medal (1900) with clasp, and was in 1901 appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE).By late 1901 he had moved to North-West Frontier Province and was present during the Mahsud-Waziri Blockade, 1901–02. He was in Malakand in 1902 and took part in the PMO Tibet Mission to Lhasa 1903–04, for which he was again mentioned in despatches, received a medal with clasp and was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Waddell then returned to England where he briefly became Professor of Tibetan at the University College of London (1906–1908).

In 1908, Waddell began to learn Sumerian.Thus in his later career he turned to studying the ancient near east, especially Sumeria and dedicated his time to deciphering or translating ancient cuneiform tablets or seals, most notably including the Scheil dynastic tablet. In 1911, Waddell published two entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica. By 1917, Waddell was fully retired and first started exclusively writing on Aryans, beginning in an article published in the Asiatic Review entitled "Aryan Origin of the World's Civilization".From the 1920s Waddell published several works which attempted to prove an Aryan(i.e., Indo-European) origin of the alphabet and the appearance of Indo-European myth figures in ancient Near Eastern mythologies (e.g., Hittite, Sumerian, Babylonian). The foundation of his argument is what he saw as a persistence of cult practices, religious symbols, mythological stories and figures, and god and hero names throughout Western and Near Eastern civilizations, but also based his arguments on his deciphered Sumerian and Indus-Valley seals, and other archaeological findings.

Waddell died in 1938. That same year, he had completed writing Trojan Origin of World Civilization. The book was never published.