Asko Parpola

Asko Heikki Siegfried Parpola (born 12 July 1941, in Forssa) is a Finnish Indologist, current Professor Emeritus of Indology at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in the Indus Valley Civilization, specifically the study of the Indus script.

Biography Parpola is a brother of the Akkadian language epigrapher Simo Parpola. He is married to Marjatta Parpola, who has authored a study on the traditions of Kerala's Nambudiri Brahmins.

Scholarship Parpola's research and teaching interests fall within the following topics: Indus Civilization / Indus script and religion / Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions Veda / Vedic ritual / Samaveda / Jaiminiya Samaveda texts and rituals / Purva-Mimamsa South Asian religions / Hinduism / Saiva and Sakta tradition / Goddess Durga South India / Kerala / Tamil Nadu / Karnataka Sanskrit / Malayalam / Kannada / Tamil / Prehistory of Indian languages Prehistoric archaeology of South Asia and (in broad sense) Central Asia / Coming of the Aryans

Two significant contributions of Parpola, to the field of decipherment of the Indus script, are the creation of the now universally used classification of Indus valley seals, and the proposed, and much-debated, decipherment of the language of the script.

Dravidian hypothesis

According to Parpola the Indus script and Harappan language are "most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family". Parpola led a Finnish team in the 1960s–80s that vied with Knorozov's Soviet team in investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, they proposed readings of many signs, some agreeing with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov (such as equating the "fish" sign with the Dravidian word for fish "min") but disagreeing on several other readings. A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script. He states in his book that the Brahui people of Pakistan are remnants of the Harappan culture.

Publications Books 1980: Från Indusreligion till Veda. Studier i de äldsta indiska religionerna, Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. 1985: The Sky-Garment: A study of the Harappan religion and its relation to the Mesopotamian and later Indian religions. Helsinki: The Finnish Oriental Society. 1994: Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press, 1994: Sanskritin peruskurssi, Helsinki: Suomen Itämainen Seura (3rd edn. 2003). 2005: Intian kulttuuri, Keuruu: Otava. 2015: The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization, Oxford University Press,

Selected articles 1988: ‘The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic identity of the Dāsas’, Studia Orientalia, vol. 64, pp. 195–302. The Finnish Oriental Society.

Awards Asko Parpola received the Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award for 2009 on June 23, 2010, at the World Classical Tamil Conference at Coimbatore. In 2015, he was awarded India's Presidential Award of Certificate of Honour in Sanskrit.

He is an honorary member of the American Oriental Society and, since 1990, a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.