Yuri Knorozov

The original document had disappeared, and this work was unknown until 1860s when an abridged copy was discovered in the archives of the Spanish Royal Academy by the French scholar, Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg.

Since de Landa's "alphabet" seemed to be contradictory and unclear (e.g., multiple variations were given for some of the letters, and some of the symbols were not known in the surviving inscriptions), previous attempts to use this as a key for deciphering the Maya writing system had not been successful.

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (Ю́рий Валенти́нович Кноро́зов; 19 November 1922 – 31 March 1999) was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigrapher, and ethnographer.

He became the founder of the Soviet school of Mayan studies, and his identification of the existence of syllabic signs proved an essential step forward in the eventual decipherment of the Mayan script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica.

Knorozov was born in the village of Yuzhny near Kharkov, at that time the capital of the newly formed Ukrainian SSR.

His parents were Russian intellectuals, and his paternal grandmother Maria Sakhavyan had been a stage actress of national repute in Armenia.

At school, the young Yuri was a difficult and somewhat eccentric student, who made indifferent progress in a number of subjects and was almost expelled for poor and willful behavior.

Aged 5, he sustained a heavy injury to his head that nearly left him blind.

However, it became clear that he was academically bright with an inquisitive temperament; he was an accomplished violinist, wrote romantic poetry and could draw with accuracy and attention to detail.

His scores were excellent for all subjects, except for Ukrainian language.

In 1940 at the age of 17, Knorozov left Kharkiv for Moscow where he commenced undergraduate studies in the newly created Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University's department of History.

He initially specialised in Egyptology.

Knorozov's study plans were soon interrupted by the outbreak of World War II hostilities along the Eastern Front in mid-1941.

Due to his poor health, Knorozov was unfit for regular military service in the Soviet Army; however, he and his family spent most of 1941–1943 years on the German-occupied territories, where he could be forced to join the German army support units.

Knorozov managed to avoid that by moving from village to village, where he earned his living as a school teacher.

In 1943, Knorozov survived an outbreak of typhus, and in September of that year managed to escape with his family to Moscow.

There he resumed his Egyptology studies, at the Moscow State University.

Although many details of Knorozov's life during the war remained unclear, his student Galina Ershova could not find any evidence that he traveled outside of Moscow Oblast in 1943–1945.

Knorozov himself, in an interview conducted a year before his death, denied the Berlin legend.

As he explained to the Mayanist epigrapher Harri Kettunen:

"Unfortunately it was a misunderstanding: I told about it [finding books in a library in Berlin] to my colleague Michael Coe, but he didn't get it right. There wasn't any fire in the library. And the books that were in the library, were in boxes to be sent somewhere else. The Germans had packed them, and since they didn't have time to move them anywhere, the boxes were taken to Moscow."

In 1944, he was unexpectedly recalled for a military service, but his father, who was a colonel in the Soviet Army, arranged for him a place of a telephone operator in an artillery unit stationed near Moscow.

According to a popular legend, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin.

There, Knorozov is supposed to have by chance retrieved a book which would spark his later interest in and association with deciphering the Maya script.

In the autumn of 1945 after World War II, Knorozov returned to Moscow State University to complete his undergraduate courses at the department of Ethnography.

He resumed his research into Egyptology, and also undertook comparative cultural studies in other fields such as Sinology.

He displayed a particular interest and aptitude for the study of ancient languages and writing systems, especially hieroglyphs, and he also read medieval Japanese and Arabic literature.

According to his roommate, Sevʹyan I. Vainshtein, Knorozov was entirely devoting himself to science.

After receiving a scholarship, he would spend it on books, surviving on meager food until the next scholarship.

While still an undergraduate at MSU, Knorozov found work at the N.N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (or IEA), part of the prestigious Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Knorozov's later research findings would be published by the IEA under its imprint.

This would change in 1947, when at the instigation of his professor, Knorozov wrote his dissertation on the "de Landa alphabet", a record produced by the 16th century Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa in which he claimed to have transliterated the Spanish alphabet into corresponding Maya hieroglyphs.

De Landa, who during his posting to Yucatán had overseen the destruction of all the codices from the Maya civilization he could find, reproduced his alphabet in a work (Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán) intended to justify his actions once he had been placed on trial when recalled to Spain.

As part of his ethnographic curriculum Knorozov spent several months as a member of a field expedition to the Central Asian Soviet republics of the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs (what had formerly been the Khorezm PSR, and would much later become the independent nations of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan following the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union).

On this expedition his ostensible focus was to study the effects of Russian expansionary activities and modern developments upon nomadic ethnic groups, of what was a far-flung frontier world of the Soviet state.

At this point the focus of his research had not yet been drawn on the Maya script.

The legend has been much reproduced, particularly following the 1992 publication of Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code.

Supposedly, when stationed in Berlin, Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze.

Somehow he managed to retrieve from the fire a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known as the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices.

Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script.