21/08/2026
An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Asko Parpola.
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?
Cont. at https://www.harappa.com/content/interview-asko-parpola
