Yuri Knorozov

Yuri Knorozov showed in 1952 that the Maya script was partly phonetic, which is the breakthrough that made the inscriptions readable, and he did it in Leningrad without ever having seen a Maya site. He served in the Red Army in the Second World War, and the story he enjoyed telling - that he took a copy of Diego de Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan from the burning Prussian State Library in Berlin - was his own embellishment; he acquired the book in Moscow. Landa, the sixteenth-century bishop who burned the Maya codices, had recorded what he thought was a Maya alphabet, and it had been dismissed for a century as a misunderstanding. Knorozov argued that Landa's informant had been giving the sounds of syllables rather than letters, and that the script worked as other ancient scripts do, with signs standing for consonant-vowel pairs. The dominant figure in the field, Eric Thompson, held that the glyphs were symbolic and not linguistic at all, and attacked the work publicly for years, in part because it came from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and had been published with an ideological preface he could point to. Knorozov himself did not write that preface and was refused travel for most of his career, working at the Institute of Ethnography. The decipherment was completed by others in the 1970s and 1980s using his principle, and the texts turned out to record the reigns, wars and dynastic claims of actual kings, which is what Tatiana Proskouriakoff had independently argued from the dates alone. He finally visited Guatemala and Mexico in the 1990s and was decorated by both. He is commemorated by a statue in Merida. He worked for much of his life with a Siamese cat he insisted on listing as co-author of one paper, an editorial request that was refused. The statue in Merida shows him holding it.

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