Yuri Knorozov, The Man Who Deciphered The Mayan Script In The 1950s And Named His Cat As Co-Author
- U I Team
- Nov 20, 2022
- 5 min read
When the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov finally visited Mexico in the early 1990s, he was received with the reverence normally reserved for heads of state or pop stars. Children recognised him, scholars celebrated him, and politicians honoured him. Yet in his native Russia, few knew his name, let alone his achievement. Forty years earlier, in relative obscurity, Knorozov had accomplished what generations of European and Latin American scholars had failed to do: he cracked the code of the Maya script.
His methods were unconventional, his personality reclusive, and his story largely unknown outside specialist circles. But in the world of Mesoamerican studies, Yuri Knorozov occupies a place as significant as Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and opened the door to Ancient Egypt. Knorozov, working in the austere post-war Soviet Union, unlocked the language of a civilisation across the ocean, one he wouldn’t see with his own eyes until the final years of his life.
A Child of the Stalin Era
Born in 1922 in Kharkiv, then part of Soviet Ukraine, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was the son of educated parents and came of age during one of the darkest chapters in the USSR’s history. He survived the catastrophic Holodomor famine of the 1930s and was still a student when the Second World War tore through Eastern Europe. When Nazi forces occupied Kharkiv, Knorozov was in his second year at the city's university, studying history.
Little is known about his life under occupation. It was not something one spoke about after the war, and association with enemy-controlled territories could cast a lifelong shadow. After Kharkiv was liberated, his family relocated to Moscow, and he continued his studies at Moscow State University. But the stain of occupation clung to him. Like many who had lived under Nazi rule, he was viewed with suspicion and barred from postgraduate study or travel abroad.
“A typical child of the Stalin times,” he later said, not without a trace of bitterness.
After university, Knorozov moved to Leningrad, where he worked at the Ethnographic Museum under the protection of more senior scholars. His life was sparse and largely academic. He was given a small room near the museum, wore the same modest clothes, and shared an office filled with towering stacks of books. In this quiet space, surrounded by dust and obscurity, he began to unravel one of the great archaeological mysteries of the Americas.
The Mayan Challenge
It began, by chance, with a German article. While in Moscow, Knorozov came across a paper by the German scholar Paul Schellhas, which asserted that the Maya script was impossible to decipher. To Knorozov, this was less a statement of fact than a challenge. “What was invented by a human mind,” he later said, “can be unravelled by another human mind.”
At the time, no one in the Soviet Union was seriously studying the Maya. Knorozov, trained as an ethnographer, decided to tackle the problem alone. While working through war trophy archives from Germany, seized by Soviet forces after the fall of Berlin, he discovered reproductions of three surviving Maya codices published in 1930. These books, filled with intricate glyphs, would become the foundation of his research.
Even more crucial was his discovery of a 16th-century Spanish manuscript: Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, written by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa. In this document, de Landa attempted to describe the Maya culture and language, including a crude attempt to match Maya glyphs with letters of the Latin alphabet. Though riddled with errors, it was the closest thing to a bilingual key.
Using a statistical method known as positional analysis, Knorozov counted how often particular glyphs appeared at the beginnings and ends of words. His radical breakthrough was the realisation that the Maya script was not an alphabet, as earlier scholars had assumed, but a syllabary, each glyph represented a syllable rather than a letter or an entire word.
In 1952, he published his findings in a Soviet ethnographic journal under the title Ancient Writing of Central America. The paper caused a quiet stir. His academic supervisor was so impressed that he petitioned for Knorozov to be awarded a doctorate directly, bypassing the usual prerequisite of a candidate's degree, a rare honour in Soviet academia.
Recognition Abroad, Obscurity at Home
In the West, Knorozov’s work gained attention following the publication of The Mysteries of the Maya in Sovetsky Soyuz in 1956. He followed this with a monograph on the decipherment of Maya writing and, almost miraculously, was granted permission to attend an international congress in Copenhagen. There, for the first time, he was able to share his research with foreign scholars.
The Spanish-speaking world, especially Mexico and Guatemala, embraced him. Mexican students and officials travelled to Leningrad to meet the man who had unlocked their ancestral language. Even Jacobo Árbenz, the exiled president of Guatemala, visited him and wrote in the museum guestbook, calling Knorozov “a kind Soviet scientist to whom our nation of Maya owes so much.”
In the 1970s, Knorozov translated the deciphered Maya texts and received the USSR’s State Prize. Internationally, scholars began comparing him to Champollion, much to his amusement. Yet despite these accolades, travel restrictions and bureaucratic suspicion meant he remained in the Soviet Union for decades.
The Long Road to Mexico
It wasn’t until the early 1990s, some 40 years after his original publication, that Yuri Knorozov finally set foot on the land of the Maya. He was invited by the president of Guatemala, and soon after made three visits to Mexico, where he was given a hero’s welcome. In his old age, he was finally able to walk among the temples of Palenque, Mérida, Uxmal and Dzibilchaltun, reading the glyphs he had once only seen in photographs.
Mexico awarded him its highest honour for foreigners: the Order of the Aztec Eagle. He accepted it with quiet pride.
The Eccentric Genius
Knorozov’s eccentricities are the stuff of legend. He was famously reclusive and mystical, and often said to have a deep interest in shamanism. He pursued studies into the linguistic connections between the Ainu of Japan and Native American peoples, and even tried his hand at deciphering Easter Island’s enigmatic Rongorongo script and Proto-Indian writing systems.
But perhaps the most endearing aspect of his personality was his affection for cats. In every published article, he tried — often unsuccessfully — to include a photograph of himself with his cat Aspid (later referred to as Asya). He even listed her as co-author of his academic papers, though her name was invariably removed by editors. When a publication once cropped her out of an author photo, Knorozov reportedly became furious.
Legacy
Yuri Knorozov died in 1999, largely unknown in his home country but revered in Latin America. His work not only solved a centuries-old puzzle but also transformed our understanding of a civilisation once thought to be mute. By reading their own words, modern scholars could now glimpse the beliefs, rituals and histories of the Maya as they were written — not by European chroniclers, but by the Maya themselves.
In a life marked by war, suspicion, poverty and eccentric brilliance, Knorozov never gave up on his belief in the power of the human mind to decode the past. It took decades before he could stand in the shadow of a Maya pyramid and read its meaning aloud. But when he did, the world — finally — listened.
