The ancient script of the Maya baffled scholars for centuries.
Widely viewed as one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, which peaked around A.D. 250-900, the Maya people of Mesoamerica are known to have been great astronomers who also developed sophisticated methods of agriculture and architecture. They built major cities with stone buildings and huge pyramid temples whose vestiges can still be found in one continuous territory that now lies in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western part of Honduras.
Despite being studied for generations, there were many gaps in our knowledge of Mayan history that were not filled until the deciphering of the Maya's strange writings, whose mysteries were finally unraveled by a Soviet academic who was born near Kharkiv, 100 years ago this week.
"Yuri Knorozov was an integral part of the decipherment process of the Maya script," said Harri Kettunen, an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at the University of Helsinki and president of the European Association of Mayanists, who says the Ukrainian-born Russian linguist is now "popularly regarded as the man who single-handedly cracked the Maya code."
Before Knorozov published his seminal article Ancient Writing of Central America (Древняя письменность Центральной Америки) in the early 1950s, researchers had long been flummoxed by the Mayan script, which was widely thought to be a hieroglyphic system of enigmatic symbols and signs whose meaning had long been lost in the mists of time.
Knorozov, however, made a major breakthrough by providing compelling evidence that many of the Mayan glyphs were syllabic in nature, representing sounds rather than ideas and that these syllables could be used to decipher words and their meanings.
Although a combination of Cold War politics and academic rivalry meant that it took decades before his work was widely accepted, Knorozov's research is now lauded for the role it played in uncovering the secrets of the Maya.
"He was the first person to successfully demonstrate the phonetic nature of Mayan hieroglyphic writing," Kettunen told RFE/RL by e-mail. "However, it took a while before his work was acknowledged on the other side of the Iron Curtain."
Indeed, the story of how one lone scholar from the Soviet Union managed to convince the wider world that he had cracked the code of the Maya without actually setting foot in the Americas is now the stuff of academic legend, not least because -- like the ancient culture he studied -- Knorozov's life is shrouded in mystery, particularly when it comes to his formative years in Ukraine.
He was born in 1922 to a family of Russian-Armenian heritage in the northeastern Ukrainian village of Pivdenne, where he was considered to have been an unruly but academically talented youth.
"From what I've learned, Knorozov wasn't the easiest student in school," said Kettunen, who interviewed the Soviet scholar one year before his death in 1999. "He had a will of his own and was described as eccentric. However, teachers apparently recognized his intelligence and artistic skills, including playing the violin and writing poetry."
Yuri Knorozov, the linguist who deciphered the Maya script, 1953. He listed his cat Asya as a co-author on his work but the editors always removed her. He always used this photo with Asya as his author photo and got pissed when ever editors cropped her out. All the photos of him are like this, I love that this guy understood he had been born with the face of a wizard or axe murderer and just leaned fully into it.
