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Soon after, George and his Berkeley team launched the Harappa excavations. Being the second largest site of Indus Civilization, Harappa shares few common features with Moen jo Daro. After the ban on Mohen jo Daro excavations George had always hoped to unearth some significant material from Harappa to compensate for what could not be salvaged from the sub-merged layers of Mohen jo Daro. The opportunity arrived when the Smithsonian Institute sponsored his eighteen-member team to undertake excavations at Harappa. In 1988, after digging many finds, he had come to deliver a lecture at the American Consulate General in Karachi. After the lecture he sat with me for an exclusive interview for the daily Dawn.  

The meeting coincided with the times when I was studying the symbols and the iconography of the seals. By now I had realized that 5000 years ago the Indus scribes made use of horizontal and vertical lines and they knew the concept of parallel lines! However, the answer that I was seeking from George was not about this simple observation but about his views on interpreting the seals. I was curious to know about a seal he had discovered from Moen jo Daro and I received a detailed answer: “One of my intentions to come to Pakistan was that I was interested in the sea trade of the ancient people. The whole question of trade obviously needed boats but the archaeological evidence of boats is practically zero and there are only three representations of boats that I know of in excavated sites. When we excavated Mohenjo Daro in 1965 we discovered the seal with the picture of a boat and perched on top of the boat was a bird…when we went down to the Indus river via Mohenjo Daro and saw Mohannas (fishermen) who live in their boat homes and that in every single boat there was a bird as they used these birds for fishing purposes we could see a continuity of tradition, here we have a 4000-year-old representation of it in Pakistan.”

 Amidst all that disappointment in the seal research George’s evaluation of the seal made some sense, at least through the seals, we can identify many present-day traditions rooted in the Indus Civilization. I had often wondered why the traditions and dialects of the Indus region were not considered for serious research, although a few Sindhi scholars had done significant work on this subject. I feel most of that work has not reached the mainstream archaeologists.

I am not a linguist but Sindhi being my mother tongue has helped me in identifying a few ancient words that had survived in the vernacular dialects. Growing up in my village in the Tharparkar district of lower Sindh, I am familiar with the rustic language of older folks, sadly, that language is now on the verge of extinction. N.A. Baloch, realizing the value of such words, had strongly suggested the inclusion of Sindhi in the mainstream Indus seals research; G.A. Allana, also a former vice chancellor and professor of linguistics,  University of Sindh, Jamshoro, had listed Sindhi words to draw their comparison with the Dravidian words; Murray Emeneau of the University of California Berkeley had already researched the non-literary Dravidian languages. Considering all these precedents similar research can be done on the Sindhi language. I asked George the next question: “Do you think the study of such words and their derivatives will help in the understanding of Indus language and script?’  He drew my attention to the existence of the sub-stratum of words that go beyond urbanization of Sumer. Ancient words from the pre-urban phase of Indus Civilization may be preserved in the Sindhi language. However, further research in linguistics is required to identify such words. 

My chance to study the seals officially came in the spring of 1991 when Cornell University in Ithaca, New York accepted me as a visiting scholar. Kenneth Kennedy, physical anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evoultionary biology who was also known for his work on the early humans in South Asia, provided me with the opportunity to lecture in a semester-long seminar on South Asian prehistory. Apart from Kenneth and myself, Sudharshan Seneviratne of the Institute of Fundamental Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka was the third participant of the seminar. (Currently, Seneviratne is the High Commisioner of Sri Lanka in Bangladesh). For me the seminar was also a perfect platform to introduce my work and this led to my affiliation with the South Asia Program at Cornell for the next seven years. 

By that time I had also realized that identifying ancient words on the seals was not so simple, perhaps, there were a few more steps to be crossed in order to reach that stage. I was still struggling to understand the lines and had made minor progress by observing that the Indus  scribes also knew the concept of dividing a line in equal parts as on some of the seals the vertical lines were broken in two or three equal segments. A few researchers feel that such vertical lines and their segments or the short strokes appearing in the row of signs and symbols might be representing numbers.  I realized that while these lines and their segments appear independently on the seals they were also used to construct a few symbols such as the man sign and rake sign often referred to as the tree sign.  This observation turned out to be the first step of my research  at Cornell. It made sense that in order to understand the big picture of the seal iconography I must begin  by studying the smallest component of that iconography- The line segments.

So far Brahmi numerals are considered to be the oldest specimens of numbers used in the subcontinent, but there are strong and logical chances that their precursors were engraved on the ancient Indus seals. In his book The Universal History of Numbers George Ifrah has guessed about the pre-Brahmi numbers. A chart in his book shows the semblance between his proposed pre-Brahmi numerals and the vertical lines and their segments appearing on Indus seals.

Many experts agree that the very first idea of counting numbers came from the human limbs, the hand that allowed counting on fingers. And when it came to counting larger numbers, where fingers were not enough, natural substances such as sticks were used as substitutes, and then at some point merely the images of sticks represented by lines were used for counting. But before getting lost in the infinity of the numbers I preferred to focus merely on the very first five lines that the scribe may have drawn to represent the four fingers and a thumb. He or she must have realized that these lines could be manipulated in more ways than the real fingers. They could be positioned horizontally, vertically and diagonally, they could touch each other from any point and they could even intersect each other, perhaps, a vague idea of angles might have occurred to the scribe as he or she played around with these segments to form more angles and more shapes. But the very first and the most mystifying moment must have been the realization that even the shape of the man himself could be created by five sticks or five lines and that is exactly what he or she engraved on the seals.  The stick figure man that we still use as a symbol to represent the human body was used for the same purpose by the Indus scribes. 

 Hence, when one looks at the many rows of symbols one can spot the man sign standing along with the fish sign, the rake sign, the tree sign and so on. I began my research by studying step by step through diagrams, how a particular number of line segments could be arranged and rearranged in a specific template to construct a variety of signs. As simple as it all seems I still had no answer for the curved lines that made the ovals, the fish signs and what looked like parenthesis or brackets. There are many scholars who are intrigued by these images and who have dedicated their lives to deciphering these images and while I admired their dedication I also wanted to be one of them.