Asko Parpola, Professor Emeritus of Indology at the University of Helsinki, is the leading scholar of the ancient Indus script. He came to it as a Sanskritist — his doctorate was on the Sāmaveda, and he has spent a lifetime editing Vedic ritual text. In the mid-1960s he turned a computer loose on the Indus signs together with his brother Simo and the mathematician Seppo Koskenniemi, producing the first concordances of the inscriptions and, with them, the basic tools every later student of the script has used. Deciphering the Indus Script (Cambridge University Press, 1994) remains the most sustained argument that the writing encodes a Dravidian language, while The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2015) traces what the Harappans may have bequeathed to the religion of later India. Alongside this he has co-edited the multi-volume Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions, the collected record of every known Indus seal and inscription from India, Pakistan and beyond, a work he is still completing (Volume 3.4 is due soon). Few scholars have looked at ancient Indus signs for as long, or as carefully and in the context of what we know about other contemporary Bronze Age civilizations. Dr. Parpola was interviewed over Zoom on December 12, 2025 in Helsinki from San Francisco.
Omar: A little bit of your personal background would be a great place to start.
Asko: My mother and father were both chemical engineers, mother working as a research scholar in the patent office and father heading the food laboratory of a major marketing chain. I am their eldest son, and have two brothers, Simo and Matti. We all went to a classical lyceum, studying besides other subjects also several languages, our native Finnish, and Swedish, the second official language of Finland (both 8 years), Latin (7 years), German (6 years) and English (3 years).
My parents bought a piece of land and had a summer house built there in 1949-50. By a curious coincidence, it turned out that our summer time neighbor Professor (of Education) Matti Koskenniemi had been born in Japan like my mother, and that his father had been the predecessor of my grandfather K. E. Salonen in the Japan mission.
My maternal uncle Armas Salonen, also born in Japan, became Professor of Assyriology. In my youth I visited his home, which had fascinating objects from his travels in the Near East. I guess his example made me think that becoming an orientalist might be an interesting career.
Our summer neighbor had four sons, but the eldest almost never came to the summer house. But we three brothers and the neighbor’s three other sons, Seppo, Jouko and Kimmo, always spent our summers together.
Entering Helsinki University in 1959, Sanskrit became my main subject, but I studied also Latin and ancient Greek. A major sensation in Greek studies was the decipherment of the Linear B script by Michael Ventris in 1952-53. It extended the history of the Greek language backwards several centuries. I studied with great interest the book (1958) in which John Chadwick described this feat in detail.
By 1964, Seppo Koskenniemi had become a computer mathematician working for IBM. Now he made the following offer: “if you want to try the use of a computer for anything, I could do the programming.” I suggested that we could do something with the undeciphered Indus script, just as a hobby. My brother Simo was also interested to join our team. He was studying Assyriology, but had been greatly interested in the then little understood Maya script during school time.
Our first tasks were to collect the texts from the photographs in archaeological reports, to make a list of all different Indus signs and assigning a number for each of them, to convert the texts into numerical form, and to punch them on cards so that they could be read and handled by the computer. The lists produced were also in numerical form, and in order to understand them, we had to replace the numbers with Indus signs manually. Eventually we could define the original shapes of the Indus signs for the computer so that a plotter could draw the outputs in Indus signs. In 1973 we produced the first computer-drawn concordance to Indus texts.
Omar: What drew you to the Indus to begin with? What was the interest in Sanskrit or the Indus signs? It was quite obscure a subject in those days.
Asko: I liked ancient Greek literature very much, especially Homer and Herodotus, but the scope for research is rather limited if one wants to do something original. What new can one say about Homer after thousands of scholars have written on the topic since the Renaissance? I wanted to do primary research and chose Sanskrit literature because there are so many texts that have not been translated or even edited. The Indus script on the other hand has the potential of opening up entirely new vistas in Indian prehistory, but the challenge is great. Still, one could start by producing some basic research tools.
Omar: In 1973 you did that first computer concordance of the Indus texts. When you were working, did you have any teachers who inspired you in the university or in grade school?
Asko: My Sanskrit teacher was Professor Pentti Aalto. He had been deciphering coded messages of the enemy during the war with Russia 1939-1944. Aalto followed our work on the Indus script with interest, and in 1969 encouraged me to attempt concrete readings of Indus signs. At that time, I had studied only Sanskrit and Pali, but I was fairly sure that the Indus script was based on a Dravidian language.
Omar: What made you so sure then?
Asko: Dravidian was the most likely candidate. The Rig Vedic hymns — the earliest Sanskrit texts composed in and around the Indus Valley around 1500-1300 BCE — have about ten generally acknowledged Dravidian loanwords, evidently adopted by the Indo-Aryan speakers in South Asia. Later on, other reasons have emerged to support the Dravidian hypothesis.
I took my doctorate in 1968 while I was doing my military service in Finland. The thesis dealt with Sanskrit texts belonging to the Sāmaveda. Immediately after finishing the army my family took the ship to Copenhagen, Denmark, where I took up my first job as a Research Fellow at the Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. I could not immediately continue work on the Indus script, but in 1969 I tried some readings, which seemed to make sense.
Omar: What were those first readings, what were the first signs you tackled?
Asko: First sign read was the very frequently occurring fish-shaped sign. In Proto-Dravidian as well as in Old Tamil, mīn means both ‘fish’ and ‘star’. I remember very well how I was jogging in Copenhagen and felt very happy about this rebus reading, as the ‘star’ meaning of the ‘fish’ signs seemed appropriate for seal inscriptions. Gradually I could expand this hypothesis by finding explanations to signs associated with the ‘fish’ signs. They consist of various numbers immediately preceding plain ‘fish’ signs, for instance, 6 + fish, in Old Tamil aṛu-mīn, the name of the constellation of Pleiades, and of diacritic additions to the basic ‘fish’ sign that could be interpreted as words for colors, the corresponding compound words that are names of planets in Old Tamil.
Omar: How did you learn Dravidian? How did you learn Old Tamil? That’s a whole other language besides Sanskrit.
Asko: Of course. Well, after we put out a preliminary report on the first attempts at reading the Indus script from Copenhagen in 1969, it was read in India among others by Professor V. I. Subramoniam, who taught Dravidian linguistics in Trivandrum. He wrote to me and proposed sending one of his advanced students to Copenhagen to teach me. Dr. R. Panneerselvam came there almost immediately. Naturally, this was just the beginning, and I had to study the relevant literature in due course.
Omar: That mīn = ‘fish/star’ has remained one of your best decipherments, because it’s so internally consistent.
Asko: Yes.
Omar: Have you ever changed your mind or added to it or had any doubts about that whole mīn = ‘fish/star’ set of decipherments?
Asko: There are details about which I am not sure, but on the whole, I still very much approve of the idea.
Omar: Yes, I would agree. So then what happened? You published three preliminary reports in 1969-1970. How did your study of the Indus script evolve in the early 70s?
Asko: Well, those preliminary reports had many reviews. Most of them were painful reading. In the first enthusiasm, I had put in many unripe ideas that had not been tested enough, and made bad mistakes in handling the Dravidian data. But a few reviews by great decipherment authorities were positive and encouraging. I continued the work by sticking to ideas which appeared to be right, and eliminating what had turned out to be wrong. I tried to be very careful while writing Deciphering the Indus Script (1994). It was ready in 1987 when I handed it in to the Cambridge University Press, but it took seven years to emerge from the publisher.
Omar: It’s a fantastic book. When did you meet Iravatham Mahadevan?
Asko: I first met Mahadevan in 1970. We both took part in the Third International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies in Paris. We more or less immediately became friends. Mahadevan was reciting the Rig Veda while we walked together in the parks of Paris.
Omar: He was such a good man. I liked him so much.
Asko: He was indeed very nice. As far as interpretation is concerned, we did not agree on many things except that the Indus script was based on Dravidian.
Omar: I liked Mahadevan a lot. Because my wife is Tamil, so I would go to Chennai, and whenever I went to Chennai I would meet him. What do you think his contribution has been to this field in general and what are your disagreements and how have those evolved?
Asko: Mahadevan was inspired by our first Indus script concordance published in 1973. He took contact with the computer specialists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, and with their help he produced a very good concordance of his own in 1977. Besides the texts he included many other things in the concordance. I appreciate this book as his most important contribution. Another important contribution was his founding the Indus Research Centre at the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai.
Omar: Which is doing good work.
Asko: I think so too.
Omar: What were your main disagreements with Mahadevan? Where did you see things differently than he did?
Asko: I didn’t agree with his pictorial interpretations of the Indus signs. But in my opinion, Mahadevan was basically correct in thinking that Sanskrit has preserved translations of Harappan-Dravidian terms and phrases. A language shift took place among the substratum population of North India, and some originally Harappan ideas came to be expressed in Sanskrit. Specifically, I am thinking about onomastics. If you look at people’s proper names in Bengal, many end in -datta and -gupta. This could go back to an originally Harappan tradition.
Omar: What about Punjabi and Sindhi? Do you think they would also carry some remnants of the original Harappan language?
Asko: I think that is quite possible. The material culture in the Punjab and Sindh certainly has survivals. Village culture is very conservative and has changed very little. Many things are likely to have survived in the Indus Valley.
Omar: Tell me a little bit about your thinking about the unicorn. I know you’ve had different theories over time about the unicorn. Is it a real animal? Is it a mythical animal? Is it something else? How has your thinking about it evolved over the years?
Asko: I think the ‘unicorn’ is a borrowing from Mesopotamia. Already around 3000 BCE the Mesopotamians have a bull depicted with just one horn in images. The most important thing which has convinced me that it really is from Mesopotamia is one tablet from Mohenjo-daro. It depicts a procession where people are carrying various objects, including the unicorn on top of a pole. Another interesting thing is those people are kneeling, which suggests worship. Now there is an ivory image of a similar procession in the city of Mari in Mesopotamia, which depicts a victory parade in honor of the goddess of war and victory. It includes a man carrying a unicorn bull on the top of a pole.
The unicorn bull depicted in Mesopotamia is the wild bull, Bos taurus, which did not belong to the fauna of the Indus Valley. The Harappans probably had in view some other animal, which they merged with the Mesopotamian bull. I think that that animal is the blue bull, nilgai. How do I come to this conclusion? Because the Vedic texts tell a myth about god Prajāpati who created all animal species. The main couple in these mythic stories is the nilgai, with blue bull and red cow. Some Harappan renderings of the unicorn do resemble the nilgai bull.
Omar: So you think it was partially a mythical animal, a Mesopotamian icon put together with an Indus real animal, and you have this kind of thing.
Asko: Yes.
Omar: What do you think it represented then? Mark Kenoyer, the leading Indus archaeologist, thinks it is some kind of representative of the trading class or of some kind of administrative function, perhaps because the unicorn is so common. What might it have represented in terms of the socio-economic situation?
Asko: I think because it is so common it could represent all people. I mean the Indus people on the whole. Special people have special iconography, other animals and scenes.
Omar: How do you conceptualize the relationship between the Indus and the Mesopotamian people? Of course it’s a very complicated topic. I fully believe there were a lot of exchanges going on both ways. I wonder how you think these ancient civilizations influenced each other.
Asko: I think Mesopotamia was in the innovative center of the world, while the Indus Valley was at the edge, more or less at the receiving end.
Omar: Yet when I look at Queen Puabi, and the carnelian that went into the Mesopotamian jewelry, I have the sense that the Mesopotamians looked up to the Indus people or valued some of their things.
Asko: Sure, certainly they valued some of their things. On the whole, I think the Mesopotamians had the upper rank. They had writing that could be read easily. Lots of literature. But eventually the king of Meluhha joined the upsurge that went against the Mesopotamian king.
Omar: So why didn’t the Indus people then pick up the cuneiform writing? The Indus script looks extremely different.
Asko: The Harappans invented the Indus script some time before the maritime connections with Mesopotamia started, around 2600 BCE approximately. When they first met the Mesopotamians, they already had their own writing.
Omar: I met with Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert and Assistant Keeper at the British Museum last month. He believes very firmly that the Harappans had long texts in the Indus script, because there was no way you could manage such big cities administratively without having things comparable to the cuneiform tablets. You would need an administrative system with longer texts and records. What do you think about that point?
Asko: I think so too. They probably had longer records on perishable material, and why not on palm leaves?
Omar: Or what about wood or cloth? Would cloth be something that they could write on, or is that not a good substance?
Asko: Why not? But after all palm leaves are the traditional writing material in South Asia.
Omar: That’s true. You don’t believe that the Indus civilization was a peaceful civilization?
Asko: No, no. There was a ruthless destruction of the Early Harappan cities when the Mature Harappans came to the scene. That could not happen without violence.
Omar: Where do you think those Mature Harappans came from? Do you think they were a different people or was there an internal development within the society that then took over? I don’t know if you have any guess about that.
Asko: If one looks at the seals, it seems that the basics of the Indus seal come from the northern Indus Valley, ultimately going back to traditions of eastern Iran. But after the form of the seal had been established, important iconography, especially the unicorn, seems to come from the south, from the Kulli culture. So the Mature Indus seal seems to be a union of these two traits.
Omar: Which is what I like about your way of thinking: it seems that cultures always merge and put things together. You have these dimensions of different cultures built upon each other so that they become a new culture — that’s the way history develops. It seems to me to make a lot of sense.
Writing seems to have developed in the whole world around the same time, between about 3500 and 2500 BCE. Why in so many places in the same millennia roughly? Do you think it was because of interchange? That they copied each other? I don’t know if you have any ideas about that.
Asko: The earliest scripts are Sumerian and Egyptian, when we are talking of real writing. There was a writing on the way much earlier, a thousand years earlier than Sumerian, in the Carpathian Basin in Europe. But invading herders from the steppes more or less destroyed that agriculturally-based civilization so that real writing did not come into being.
It requires a certain level of society and then almost automatically, writing evolves. In China it was a bit later. But I don’t think the Chinese script was copied, it was indigenous. And so it was in Meso-America.
Omar: Do you think it has to do with agriculture or cities or combination?
Asko: Both. In Egypt the idea of writing was perhaps brought by Sumerians who came up the Nile river as traders. These Sumerians seem to have taken over the rule of Upper Egypt and had Egyptian priests to develop the writing. The historical process can be compared with the old Rus, Viking traders who took over Kiev and started ruling the local Slavic people. For two or three generations they preserved their original Scandinavian identity and names, but in the third generation, they were already speaking old Russian.
If we look at Egypt, in the very beginning royal iconography is almost purely Mesopotamian. In the beautiful flint knife of Gebel el-‘Araq, a king holds back two lions, wearing the royal dress of a Sumerian king, not Egyptian. But after some generations the Sumerian-style art became Egyptianized.
Omar: That makes sense, but why are there so few Mesopotamian relics or signs in the Indus cities? If the Harappans were the periphery and looked up to the Mesopotamians you would expect more Mesopotamian people or more Mesopotamian objects.
Asko: The Mesopotamians did not sail further than the Persian Gulf. They came to Oman but not further to the Indus Valley.
Omar: Because their religion prevented them?
Asko: The Mesopotamian kings made ground expeditions eastwards reaching the Proto-Elamite civilization of Jiroft in the middle of Iran’s south coast.
Omar: How literate do you think the Indus people were in their cities? Do you think there was widespread literacy? Could many people read or understand the signs? What are your feelings about that?
Asko: We have more than 2000 seals from Mohenjo-daro alone, and only one-tenth of the city has been excavated, so I think there were many people who could read.
Omar: How do you think about Mohenjo-daro with respect to the other cities that we know? It seems to me like it was a very important city.
Asko: I think it was the major city, the most important one. Imagine that only one-tenth has been excavated, one-tenth of what is known to be the city. But Harappan things have been dug up a little further than the known city, so Mohenjo-daro could have been much larger.
Omar: Absolutely. Where do you think we might find a bilingual inscription? Do you think the search and the idea for that is rational? I feel we might find something in the Gulf maybe, but I wonder what your thoughts are.
Asko: I do think the Gulf and Mesopotamia are the places where one can find a bilingual inscription. But if it is a bilingual seal inscription for instance, it only covers a few signs of the Indus script. In my opinion the importance of a bilingual as a clue has been exaggerated, because one could go further in decipherment without a bilingual and find sufficient internal confirmation. It’s not easy, but it is possible. The thing is, we have several signs that are combinations of two or more signs, so they give very important internal clues to the interpretation of all the combined different signs.
Omar: Who is working on the script now? That is, sort of following in your footsteps? Who’s taking these ideas to the next level? I mean, I don’t see many people doing this work the way you’ve been doing it.
Asko: No, I do not have many followers. But if you ask who is doing Indus script decipherment, more than 100 people have written papers on the topic now during the past few years.
Omar: None of them convinced me yet at all.
Asko: I stick to my own approach.
Omar: Steve Bonta has been getting a lot of attention, his video stuff, everyone is writing to me you must look at Steve Bonta. It just doesn’t move me at all. It seems to me that the Sanskrit basis is not tenable. I understand that Sanskrit-speaking people may have come down from the north-west into the Indus Valley and they might have had some relation with the Indus civilization, but a full Sanskrit decipherment doesn’t make sense to me.
Asko: I think that before the Aryans, people from the Oxus civilization (also called Bactria and Margiana culture) in southern Central Asia came to the Indus Valley already around 2100 BCE, in the Mature Harappan period. The famous priest king of Mohenjo-daro seems to belong to these Bactria-Margiana immigrants.
A couple of centuries later, Bactria-Margiana people appear to have left a bull-drawn cart, swords, shield, and a helmet in the graveyard in Sinauli, some 60 km from Delhi.
Omar: Is that what you think, that the priest king is actually from up there?
Asko: I think so. These foreigners seem to have become a minority upper-class. In early Sanskrit we have many words which are not of Indo-Aryan origin but are probably loans from the language of Bactria-Margiana. Professor Alexander Lubotsky from the University of Leiden collected many words whose basic structure is not Indo-European – short syllable, long syllable, short syllable. So probably people from Bactria-Margiana came to the Indus Valley and beyond before the Indo-Aryans. The Indo-Aryan arrival took place only in the post-urban Late Harappan period, around 1600-1400 BCE.
Omar: How have your own views changed, if at all, around deciphering the Indus script? You started in the late 1960s, and now we are well in the 2020s. You have stuck to the fish/star interpretation very consistently. Are there other sign decipherments where you have changed your mind or adjusted your thinking?
Asko: Of course I have attempted to interpret many Indus signs but have left them unpublished as unconvincing. But there is actually one old interpretation of mine, published already in 1970, which I did not include in my 1994 book as I considered it too uncertain. Having found more support for it, I now feel confident about this interpretation.
Omar: What is that?
Asko: In the seals from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, it is the most frequent combination of any two Indus signs, very often occurring immediately after the complex ‘fish’ signs (i.e., either fish signs modified by added diacritics, or compounds starting with a number or some other sign and ending in a plain ‘fish’ sign). Because heavenly bodies represent divinities in ancient Mesopotamia, and are associated with specific gods even in later Hinduism, I am assuming that this most common compound has the meaning ‘god’ / ‘deity’, or ‘priest’. It would however be a bit too complicated to explain this interpretation in detail here. Instead, I refer you and interested readers of this interview to my paper published in Studies on the seals and inscribed objects of the Indus (Harappan) Civilization, edited by Marta Ameri, Gregg Jamison and Akinori Uesugi and appearing shortly as a special issue of the journal Archaeologies.
Omar: How do you think about Hinduism? The way I think about Hinduism is that you had many different religious currents come together and form what we call Hinduism today. Many different traditions combined. It’s a very ecumenical religion in that it can take in many different belief systems.
Asko: I think you are quite right.
Omar: It makes sense that many different religious traditions could have merged into Hinduism and it was very accepting of new ways –
Asko: Absolutely. Also in the Harappan religion they were adopting things from Mesopotamia and also from closer by, from Bactria-Margiana and from the Kulli culture.
Omar: One other question I have: Artificial Intelligence, AI, do you think it could be helpful in understanding the Indus script, do you have any thoughts about that or are you pessimistic?
Asko: AI could certainly be very helpful. One could for instance ask: what does this particular sign depict? Recognition of the object or action that a given sign represents is one very important clue to the script. Yet one must remember that the answers given by AI are not necessarily correct. I have not used AI on the Indus script, but I have asked AI to translate a passage of Russian, because I am not that fluent in Russian — started learning it too late. The resulting translation was perfect, including all the technical terms involved.
Omar: What about using AI to read Mesopotamian texts? So many Mesopotamian texts are unread and we could search through them to look for Meluhha, carnelian, Sisu wood, or whatever the words are. Do you think that’s viable?
Asko: That’s a good idea, because AI has already been made to read cuneiform. So why not read lots of unpublished tablets with it.
Omar: Tell me about your work now. What are you doing now, what are you looking forward to in the coming years? You’re finishing up the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (CISI)? Where are your studies right now?
Asko: I have had cancer already for seven years, and may not live long. The sixth volume of the Corpus, CISI III.4, is just now going to the press, and I hope that I can still work on the next, final volume. But after that I’m giving up on Indus studies. I have already given most of the CISI archive including photos to the consortium of Gregg Jamison et al., who will continue the work.
Omar: It’s a great thing you’ve done.
Asko: In this last phase of my life, I hope to be able to work a bit also on Sāmavedic texts, a topic related to my doctoral dissertation. In Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, vol. 27 (2023), I published (freely downloadable) preliminary editions of all the Sūtra texts of the Jaiminīya branch of Sāmaveda. The editions include excellent commentaries on these Sūtras by Bhavatrāta and his student and son-in-law Jayanta, two Nampūtiri Brahmins of Kerala who lived around 700 CE. The editions, which still lack the critical apparatus, were possible only after decades of manuscript collecting and photography in South India. Several of the Sūtra texts have not been published before. I discovered them in 1966 in a wrongly catalogued manuscript, which remained unique even after an intensive hunt for Jaiminīya manuscripts. I would like to finish this work if I’m given time for it.
Omar: That’s great. I would just like to say that I would love to come some day to Helsinki, and interview you properly in person.
Asko: You are most welcome.
Omar: I would really like to do that. Your contributions are just amazing. Any other things you would like to say about the ancient Indus culture or the Indus people? You probably know more about them than anybody else. So I just wonder if you have any final thoughts.
Asko: Now you are exaggerating. There are many people who know the Indus civilization much better than I do. Mark Kenoyer, to name just one person, is in possession of deep knowledge of the Harappans.
Omar: Sure.
Asko: I would like to note that the CISI project has expanded its reach. Originally it was collecting just the Indus seals and inscriptions (including graffiti, which are not necessarily writing), but now it is including also the most important pictures of painted pottery. These pictures are also a sort of communication, and they may also suggest something about the script. We have also extended the area westwards towards the border of Mesopotamia, covering the eastern part of Iran, Afghanistan, southern Central Asia (in particular Bactria-Margiana), because ideas and the shape of the seals were from that area. In vol. III.4, the area is extended further to the Deccan, where agriculture and village life came from Indus Valley.
Omar: In a sense, you’ve greatly expanded the reach of your work. That’s great, that’s wonderful. I have one last question for you. When I met Irving Finkel, he showed me the Royal Game of Ur that they have in the British Museum. He made also an interesting point that I wanted to check with you. He thinks all board games came from India. So what do you think? Do you agree with him? Do you think it was actually a cloth board that the Indians used, and that the Royal Game too was on a cloth board as he thinks? What are your thoughts about that?
Asko: Irving Finkel has thought more about that than I have. I think it’s possible. It’s also possible that the Mesopotamians and the Harappans independently of each other got the idea of board games, because both certainly were in the need of some ways of passing time.
Omar: That’s true. There is a stela in the British Museum which has a rhinoceros on it. Finkel said it was probably a baby rhinoceros that came over to Mesopotamia and died, and then the engraver made the rhinoceros imagining what it would look like a grown up. He said the word they used was sakaya which was, he said, is probably a word in the Indus language because they didn’t have a word for it in Mesopotamian. I don’t know if you’ve talked with him about this or what your thoughts are about that.
Asko: The stela in question is called “Black Obelisk”, dating from the time of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria in 859-824 BCE. The above illustration (Image 2, from A. H. Layard, The Monuments of Nineveh, London 1853, pl. 54) shows a detail where the supposed rhinoceros is depicted in the middle. Most scholars starting with Layard have said that it rather looks like a unicorn bull, which may be how the artist conceived the rhinoceros. “The Akkadian word assumed to refer to the rhinoceros in the accompanying inscription is sadēja (CAD S, 17, s.v. sadēja), but … the animal in question is said to come from Egypt rather than India” (Frank Simons, The donkey of Anšan: A rhino in Mesopotamia? Notes on the construction of meaning in a bilingual proverb. Journal of Ancient Civilizations 37 (1): 1-32, p. 14, note 71).
Omar: One other question – Professor Dani. Dr. Dani, he lived near us in Islamabad, he was a friend of my father’s and I knew him well.
Asko: I came to know him well also.
Omar: What do you think his contribution was?
Asko: Ahmad Hasan Dani (1920-2009) contributed a lot to the ancient history of South Asia. He was trained as an archaeologist under Sir Mortimer Wheeler, taking part in the excavations of Taxila and Mohenjo-daro. After Partition he moved to Dhaka in East Pakistan, where he worked as Assistant Superintendent in charge of Archaeology, and from 1950 to 1962 as Professor of History at the University of Dhaka and as the Director of the Dhaka Museum. Dani took his doctorate in 1955 at the University of Madras with a thesis entitled Prehistory and Protohistory of Eastern India, published in Calcutta in 1960. In 1958-59, Dani was Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, producing a major book on Indian palaeography (Oxford 1963). From 1962 to 1971, Dani served as Professor of Archaeology at the University of Peshawar, directing important excavations at the Sanghao Cave, Shaikhan Dheri, Timargarha in Gandhara, as well as Gumla and Rahman Dheri in the Gomal Valley, these last two digs important for the prehistory of the Indus civilization. He has published the results of these excavations promptly in the journal he founded, entitled Ancient Pakistan. He also guided the renovation of the Lahore and Peshawar Museums. In 1971 he moved to the Quaid-i-Azam University of Islamabad, where he established the Faculty of Social Sciences, serving as its dean until his retirement in 1980. During his tenure he was also the founder and director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilizations, and founder-editor of the Journal of Central Asia, after some time continued as Journal of Asian Civilizations. I got to know him well and all in all, he was a great scholar.
Omar: He was a very nice man as well.
Asko: He was a nice man indeed. My wife and I took part in his moving two-week seminar to study the numerous rock carvings and inscriptions along the just opened Karakoram Highway. We started in Rawalpindi and drove in minibuses to Hunza. Some people even went to the Chinese side of the border but my wife and I decided to stay in Hunza and get a little bit better acquainted with the area. That was a great adventure. I wanted to see if there are any rock carvings in the Indus script. Unfortunately not, but there were inscriptions in many other languages and scripts.
Omar: When did you first go to Mohenjo-daro?
Asko: I first went to Mohenjo-daro with my family in 1971. This was the same time as the German scholar Michael Jansen, later Professor of Urban Architecture at the University of Aachen. He was also there for the first time. Jansen came to direct a major research project at Mohenjo-daro.
Omar: He did a lot of good work, but he didn’t publish so much.
Asko: Jansen published a couple of books, including research reports in association with Italian scholars. He had an idea that the stūpa of Mohenjo-daro was built by the Harappans. This idea was later picked up by some other people, but I don’t remember if they acknowledged Jansen’s idea.
Omar: You saw my movie on Mohenjo-daro. Was there anything you disagreed with in my movie about Mohenjo-daro? Do you remember any point there you thought was wrong?
Asko: No, I didn’t notice anything in particular, but I will look at it again before you come.
Omar: That’s a deal. Thank you so much Asko, it’s been great talking to you and, Inshallah, I hope to come to Helsinki and interview you properly. Best wishes for your work and good luck with your health — I’m praying that you stay around for a long time.