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Yuri Knorosov

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historians, chroniclers
and history books; Historical figures

   Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov (alternatively, Knorozov; in Russian: Юрий
   Валентинович Кнорозов; b. November 19, 1922 — d. March 31, 1999) was a
   Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is particularly
   renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment
   of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya
   civilization of Mesoamerica.

Early life

   Knorosov was born in a village near Kharkov in present-day Ukraine, at
   that time the capital of the newly-formed Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
   Republic. His parents were Russian intellectuals, and his paternal
   grandmother 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 wilful behaviour. 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.

   In 1940 at the age of 17, Knorosov left Kharkov for Moscow where he
   commenced undergraduate studies in the newly-created Department of
   Ethnology at Moscow State University's faculty of History. He initially
   specialised in Egyptology.

Military service and the "Berlin Affair"

   Knorosov's study plans were soon interrupted by the outbreak of World
   War II hostilities along the Eastern Front in mid-1941. From 1943 to
   1945 Knorosov served his term in the Soviet Union's " Great Patriotic
   War" in the Red Army as an artillery spotter.

   At the closing stages of the war in May of 1945, Knorosov and his unit
   supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. It was here,
   sometime in the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin, that Knorosov is
   supposed to have by chance retrieved a book which would spark his later
   interest in and association with deciphering the Maya script. In their
   retelling the details of this episode have acquired a somewhat
   folkloric quality ("...one of the greatest legends of the history of
   Maya research"; Kettunen 1998b).

   According to the version of the anecdote which became widely-reproduced
   (particularly following the 1992 publication of Michael Coe's Breaking
   the Maya Code ), while stationed in Berlin he came across the National
   Library while it was ablaze. Somehow Knorosov managed to retrieve from
   the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a
   rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which
   were then known (the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices). Knorosov 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.

   However, in an interview conducted a year before his death, Knorosov
   provided a different version of the anecdote. He explained (Kettunen
   1998a, 1998b) that:
   Inner courtyard of the Preußischen Staatsbibliothek (2005)
   Enlarge
   Inner courtyard of the Preußischen Staatsbibliothek (2005)

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

   The "National Library" mentioned in these accounts is not specifically
   identified by name, but at the time the library then known as the
   Preußischen Staatsbibliothek (Prussian State Library) had that
   function. Situated on Unter den Linden and today known as the Berlin
   State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), this was the largest
   scientific library of Germany. During the war, most of its collection
   had been dispersed over some 30 separate storage places across the
   country for safe-keeping. After the war much of the collection was
   returned to the library, however a substantial number of volumes which
   had been sent for storage in the eastern part of the country were never
   recovered, with upwards of 350,000 volumes destroyed and a further
   300,000 missing. Of these, many ended up in Soviet and Polish library
   collections, and in particular at the Russian State Library in Moscow.

Resumption of studies

      any possible system made by a man can be solved or cracked by a man.
   —Yuri Knorosov (1998), St. Petersburg. Interview published in Revista
                                                   Xamana (Kettunen 1998a)

   In the autumn of 1945 after the war, Knorosov 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 in medieval Japanese and Arabic literature.

   While still an undergraduate at MSU, Knorosov 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. Knorosov's later
   research findings would be published by the IEA under its imprint.

   As part of his ethnographic curriculum Knorosov spent several months as
   a member of a field expedition to the Central Asian Russian republics
   of the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs (what had formerly been the Khorezm SSR,
   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 the 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. This would change in 1947, when at the instigation of his
   professor, Knorosov 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, based on input from Maya informants. 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. The original document had disappeared, and this work was unknown
   until 1862 when an abridged copy was discovered in the archives of the
   Spanish Royal Academy by the French scholar, Charles Etienne 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.

Key research

   the page from Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (1853
   edition by Brasseur de Bourbourg), which contained description of the
   de Landa alphabet which Knorosov relied upon for his breakthrough.
   Enlarge
   the page from Diego de Landa's Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (1853
   edition by Brasseur de Bourbourg), which contained description of the
   de Landa alphabet which Knorosov relied upon for his breakthrough.

   In 1952 Knorosov published a paper which was later to prove to be a
   seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki,
   or "Ancient Writing of Central America".) The general thesis of this
   paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as ancient
   Egyptian and Cuneiform which were generally or formerly thought to be
   predominantly logographic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact
   contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than
   the symbols representing only or mainly whole words or concepts, many
   symbols in fact represented the sound elements of the language in which
   they were written, and had alphabetic or syllabic elements as well,
   which if understood could further their decipherment. By this time,
   this was largely known and accepted for several of these, such as
   Egyptian hieroglyphs (the decipherment of which was famously commenced
   by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 using the tri-lingual Rosetta
   Stone artefact); however the prevailing view was that Mayan did not
   have such features. Knorosov's studies in comparative linguistics drew
   him to the conclusion that the Mayan script should be no different from
   the others, and that purely logographic or ideographic scripts were not
   actually so.

   Knorosov's key insight was to treat the Maya glyphs represented in de
   Landa's alphabet not as an alphabet, but rather as a syllabary. He was
   perhaps not the first to propose a syllabic basis for the script, but
   his arguments and evidence were the most compelling to date. He
   maintained that when de Landa had commanded of his informant to write
   the equivalent of the Spanish letter "b" (for example), the Maya scribe
   actually produced the glyph which corresponded to the syllable, /bay/,
   as spoken by de Landa. Knorosov did not actually put forward many new
   transcriptions based on his analysis, nevertheless he maintained that
   this approach was the key to understanding the script. In effect, the
   de Landa "alphabet" was to become almost the "Rosetta stone" of Mayan
   decipherment.

   A further critical principle put forward by Knorosov was that of
   synharmony. According to this, Mayan words or syllables which had the
   form consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) were often to be represented by
   two glyphs, each representing a CV-syllable (i.e., CV-CV). In the
   reading, the vowel of the second was meant to be ignored, leaving the
   reading (CVC) as intended. The principle also stated that when choosing
   the second CV glyph, it would be one where the vowel sound matched that
   of the first glyph syllable. Later analysis has proved this to be
   largely correct.

Critical reactions to his work

   Upon the publication of this work from a then hardly-known scholar,
   Knorosov and his thesis came under some severe and at times dismissive
   criticism. J. Eric S. Thompson, the noted British scholar regarded by
   all as the leading Mayanist of his day, led the attack. Thompson's
   views at that time were solidly anti-phonetic, and his own large body
   of detailed research had already fleshed-out a view that the Maya
   inscriptions did not record their actual history, and that the glyphs
   were founded on ideographic principles. His view was the prevailing one
   in the field, and many other scholars followed suit.

   The situation was further complicated by Knorosov's paper appearing
   during the height of the Cold War, and many were able to dismiss his
   paper as being founded on misguided Marxist- Leninist ideology and
   polemic. Indeed, in keeping with the mandatory practices of the time,
   Knorosov's paper was prefaced by a foreword written by the journal's
   editor which contained digressions and propagandist comments extolling
   the State-sponsored approach by which Knorosov had succeeded where
   Western scholarship had failed. However, despite claims to the contrary
   by several of Knorosov's detractors, Knorosov himself never did include
   such polemic in his writings.

   Knorosov persisted with his publications in spite of the criticism and
   rejection of many Mayanists of the time. He was perhaps shielded to
   some extent from the ramifications of peer disputation, since his
   position and standing at the institute was not adversely influenced by
   criticism from Western academics.

Progress of decipherment

   During the 1960s, other Mayanists and researchers began to expand upon
   Knorosov's ideas. Their further field-work and examination of the
   extant inscriptions began to indicate that actual Maya history was
   recorded in the stelae inscriptions, and not just calendric and
   astronomical information. The Russian-born but American-resident
   scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff was foremost in this work, eventually
   convincing Thompson and other doubters that historical events were
   recorded in the script.

   Other early supporters of the phonetic approach championed by Knorosov
   included Michael D. Coe and David Kelley, and whilst initially they
   were in a clear minority, more and more supporters came to this view as
   further evidence and research progressed.

   Through the rest of the decade and into the next, Proskouriakoff and
   others continued to develop the theme, and utilising Knorosov's results
   and other approaches began to piece together some decipherments of the
   script. A major breakthrough came during the first round table or Mesa
   Redonda conference at the Maya site of Palenque in 1973, when using the
   syllabic approach those present (mostly) deciphered what turned out to
   be a list of former rulers of that particular Maya city-state.

   Subsequent decades saw many further such advances, to the point now
   where quite a significant portion of the surviving inscriptions can be
   read. Most Mayanists and accounts of the decipherment history apportion
   much of the credit to the impetus and insight provided by Knorosov's
   contributions, to a man who had not as yet set foot outside of his
   native Russia, but had still been able to make important contributions
   to the understanding of this distant, ancient civilisation.

Later life

   As his theories became more widely known, Knorosov was in 1956 granted
   leave to attend an international convention of Mesoamerican scholars in
   Copenhagen. This was to be his one and only venture outside the Soviet
   Union for quite some time, since as a Soviet academic, Knorosov was
   subject to the usual restrictions placed on travel outside of the
   Soviet Union. Over subsequent years western Mayanists needed to travel
   to Leningrad to meet up with him. It was not until 1990 that he was
   eventually able to leave Russia again and finally visit the ancient
   Maya homelands and archaeological sites in Mexico and Guatemala. This
   was at the invitation of the Guatemalan President Marco Vinicio Cerezo
   Arévalo, at a time of improved diplomatic relations between the two
   countries. Cerezo presented him with an honorary medal, and Knorosov
   was able to extend his stay in the region, visiting several of the
   important Maya sites such as Tikal. However, shortly after Vinicio
   Cerezo left office, Knorosov received threats from suspected right-wing
   militarist groups who were antagonistic to the indigenous Mayan
   peoples, and was forced to go into hiding and then leave the country.

   Knorosov had broad interest in, and contributed to, other investigative
   fields such as archaeology, semiotics, human migration to the Americas
   and the evolution of the mind. However, it is his contributions to the
   field of Maya studies for which he is best remembered.

   In his very last years, Knorosov is also known to have pointed to a
   place in the United States as the likely location of Chicomoztoc, the
   ancestral land from which --according to ancient documents and accounts
   considered mythical by a sizable number of scholars-- Indian peoples
   now living in Mexico are said to have come.

   Knorosov died in St. Petersburg on March 31, 1999, of pneumonia in the
   corridors of a city hospital, just before he was due to receive the
   honorary Proskouriakoff Award from Harvard University.

List of publications

   An incomplete listing of Knorosov's papers, conference reports and
   other publications, divided by subject area and type. Note that several
   of those listed are re-editions and/or translations of earlier papers.

Maya-related

   Conference papers

     * (1955) "A brief summary of the studies of the ancient Maya
       hieroglyphic writing in the Soviet Union". Reports of the Soviet
       Delegations at the 10th International Congress of Historical
       Science in Rome, (Authorized English translation), Moscow: Akademia
       Nauk SSSR.
     * (1956) "Kratkie itogi izucheniia drevnei pis'mennosti malia v
       Sovetskom Soiuze". Proceedings of the International Congress of
       Historical Sciences (Rome, 1955), pp.343–364.
     * (1958) "New data on the Maya written language". Proc. 32nd
       International Congress of Americanists, (Copenhagen, 1956),
       pp.467–475.
     * (1959) "La lengua de los textos jeroglificos mayas". Proceedings of
       the International Congress of Americanists (33rd session, San José,
       1958), pp.573–579.
     * (1970) "Le Panthéon des anciens Maya". Proceedings of the
       International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
       (7th session, Moscow, 1964)., pp.126–232.

   Journal articles

     * (1952) "Drevnyaya pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noy Ameriki. (Ancient
       Writings of Central America)". Sovetskaya Etnografiya 3 (2):
       pp.100–118.
     * (1955) "Pis'mennost drevnikh maiia. (Written Language of the
       Ancient Maya)". Sovetskaya Etnografiya 1: pp.94–125.
     * (1956) "New data on the Maya written language". Journal de la
       Société des Américanistes de Paris 45: pp.209–217.
     * (1958) "Estudio de los jeroglíficos mayas en la U.R.S.S. (The Study
       of Maya hieroglyphics in the USSR)". Khana, Revista municipal de
       artes y letras (La Paz, Bolivia) 2 (17-18): pp.183–189.
     * (1958) "The problem of the study of the Maya hieroglyphic writing".
       American Antiquity 23 (3): pp.248–291.
     * (1962) "Problem of deciphering Mayan writing". Diogènes (Montreal)
       40: pp.122-128.
     * (1963) "Machine decipherment of Maya script". Soviet Anthropology
       and Archeology 1 (3): pp.43-50.
     * (1963) "Aplicación de las matematicas al estudio lingüistico
       (Application of mathematics to linguistic studies)". Estudios de
       Cultura Maya (Mexico City) 3: pp.169-185.
     * (1965) "Principios para descifrar los escritos mayas. (Principles
       for deciphering Maya writing)". Estudios de Cultura Maya (Mexico
       City) 5: pp.153-188.
     * (1968) "Investigación formal de los textos jeroglíficos mayas.
       (Formal investigations of Maya hieroglyphic texts)". Estudios de
       Cultura Maya (Mexico City) 7: pp.153-188.
     * (1973) "Zametki o kaldare Maia: 365-dnevnyi god". Sovetskaya
       Etnografiya 1: pp.70–80.
     * (1974) "Notas sobre el calendario maya; el monumento E de Tres
       Zapotes". América Latina; estudios de científicos soviéticos 3:
       pp.125–140.
     * (1986) "Acerca de las relaciones precolombinas entre América y el
       Viejo Mundo". América Latina; estudios de científicos soviéticos 1:
       pp.84–98.

   Books

     * (1954) La antigua escritura de los pueblos de America Central.
       Fondo de Cultura Popular.
     * (1955) Sistema Pis'ma Drevnikh Maiia. Moscow: Institut Etnografii,
       Akademia Nauk USSR.
     * (1956) Diego de Landa: Soobshchenie o delakh v Yukatani, 1566.
       Moscow: Akademia Nauk USSR. (Knorosov's doctoral dissertation)
     * (1963) Pis'mennost Indeitsev Maiia. Moscow-Leningrad: Institut
       Etnografii, Akademia Nauk USSR.
     * (1967) “The Writing of the Maya Indians”, Tatiana Proskouriakoff
       (Ed.): Russian Translation Series 4, Sophie Coe (trans.), Cambridge
       MA.: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
     * (1975) Ieroglificheskie Rukopisi Maiia. Leningrad: Institut
       Etnografii, Akademia Nauk USSR.
     * (1982) Maya Hieroglyphic Codices, Sophie Coe (trans.), Albany NY.:
       Institute for Mesoamerican Studies.
     * (1999) “Comendio Xcaret de la escritura jeroglifica maya descifrada
       por Yuri V. Knorosov”, Promotora Xcaret. Mexico City: Universidad
       de Quintana Roo.
     * (2001) “New data on the Maya written language”, Stephen Houston,
       Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos and David Stuart, eds: The
       Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing. Norman OK.: University of
       Oklahoma Press, pp.144-152.

Others

     * (1957) "Preliminary Report on the Study of the Written Language of
       Easter Island". Journal of the Polynesian Society 66 (1): pp.5–17.
       (on the Rongorongo script, with N.A. Butinov)
     * (1965) Yuri Knorosov (ed.): Predvaritel’noe soobshchenie ob
       issledovanii protoindiyskikh textov. Moscow: Institut Etnografii,
       Akademia Nauk USSR. (Collated results of a research team under
       Knorosov investigating the Harappan script, with the use of
       computers)
     * (1981) "Protoindiyskie nadpisi (k probleme deshifrovki)".
       Sovetskaya Etnografiya 5 (2): pp.47–71. (on the Harappan script of
       the Indus Valley civilization)

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