A Partial Decipherment of the Unknown Kushan Script

Brilliant work! Also, very nicely written up too :)

It reminds me strongly of a book I picked up on a dusty old shelf of a used bookshop when I was a kid: the story of decipherment by maurice pope. Was the most grownup book I had ever read up until that point, but also really appealing to the adventure of a kid: I was hooked! Followed that up with reading simon singh’s the code book (about a different kind of cipher, but actually referencing Maurice’s work, so complimenting it) and I was hooked and ended up set on a path to becoming a computer programmer!

There! That’s my fond memories and today I still hobby program around puzzles and compression. That is the danger of used bookshops which kids nowadays are safe from?!

Can’t recommend those two books warmly enough, even to seasoned programmers. If mental adventure is why you like computers then those books will suck you in just like this article will :)

(Lots of progress has been made deciphering things like Mayan hieroglyphics since Maurice’s book? Are there any new books or websites that bring things up to date?)

A very interesting read, and surprisingly accessible. They walk through the decipherment process step by step, explaining the logic at each point.

Quite fascinating glimpse into the past.

Fascinating.

And isn't it great that our ancestors left all these bi- and trilinguals? Imagine: They only did this because the elite was multi-lingual in those early empires.