Our Story

In 2017, my wife was working in LA, and I was flying down from the Bay Area every other week to visit her. The long-distance part was hard enough—but flying Southwest to Burbank every two weeks? Brutal. 😅 One weekend, we were just trying to find something interesting to do (spoiler: LA isn’t as magical as the movies make it seem), and we ended up at the Getty Villa. That visit completely changed the way I think about history. The Getty Villa is more than a museum—it’s the product of a billionaire’s passion for excavating, translating, and spotlighting ancient Greek culture. Getty and others poured enormous resources into digging through the dirt of southern Greece and bringing those stories to light. And it worked. Today, ancient Greece is foundational to how we think about “Western civilization.” But it also made me wonder: Who’s doing this for ancient Persia? For the Sumerians, Akkadians, Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanians? The painful answer: almost no one. These civilizations—so vital to human history—are often overlooked. One reason? They wrote everything on cuneiform tablets. Tens of thousands of these tablets remain untranslated, and the ones that have been translated are buried in obscure academic papers, disconnected from public awareness. So I decided to do something about it. I started Decoded Antiquity, a nonprofit dedicated to:

- Translating and interpreting these ancient texts

- Bringing their stories to life through engaging videos and storytelling

-  Restoring their rightful place in the story of human civilization

We are now officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in California, and 100% of donations are tax-deductible.