Back in the 1970s, my family lived in southern California. The infamous smog there often caused school closings in summer. I can recall walking home through the caustic, murky air, choking, eyes streaming with tears. Much of the time we couldn’t go to the beach, go hiking, fishing, or picnicking.

My way of coping with summer vacation was to check out five or more hardback books, usually non-fiction, from the local library. I would hole up in my bedroom and just read. One week I brought home John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B.

This book was an account of amateur epigrapher Michael Ventris and his successful efforts to decipher the unknown writing system on clay tablets found in an ancient ruined palace on the island of Crete. The book was very inspiring and reading it changed my life forever. How? At the back of the book, there was a section describing other undeciphered writing systems, with a few photos of Indus seals.

I resolved to decipher Indus script, and at once made a failed attempt and annoyed the family by talking about it. They had no interest in India or ancient writing.

Skipping the last two years of high school, I got into UCLA by virtue of high SAT scores. Anthropology was the major I settled upon, with a minor in linguistics, but instead of taking linguistic theory classes, I learned languages. After graduation I had to go find work, there was no money for graduate school. A variety of jobs followed, and marriage, and a child. I didn’t forget about Indus script, but it was on the back burner, and Indus script study materials were hard to find.

Decades later, searching for topics of interest on-line, I decided to look into Indus script once more. Surely someone had deciphered it after all this time? What I found was that aside from publication of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions books by the University of Helsinki, no progress had been made. The year was 2010. I began reading articles at harappa.com and sites of would-be Indus script decipherers, hoping to find some sound advice from experts and authorities.

One article advised hopeful decipherers to compare Indus Script signs to Brahmi script and Linear Elamite script: