How to decipher a 4,000-year-old tax return

One day in 1994 Richard Salomon, professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, received a small package in the mail. Inside were a number of blurry black and white photographs and an accompanying letter from the British Library asking if they might be of any interest.

Salomon started looking at the photos - first idly, and then with growing disbelief. "I could see pretty quickly they were the real deal." The photos showed various inscriptions that were written on a series of scrolls - scrolls of bark that the British Library had been given by an anonymous donor, who in turn, had bought them from an anonymous buyer based somewhere in Pakistan.

The inscriptions Salomon saw were written in Gandhari, a middle Indo-Aryan language closely related to Sanskrit that was in use from the third century BC to the fourth century AD. It was hardly surprising that the British Library had come straight to him. Salomon was one of the few, the very few, people in the world who could read Gandhari - or at least read some of it. "I knew the basic grammar, but there were an awful lot of words that I didn't know."...