Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (Russian: Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; 19 November 1922 – 30 March 1999) was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigraphist, and ethnologist. He is best known for the key role he played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Knorozov was born in Kharkov on 19 November 1922. His parents were Russian intellectuals who had moved from Saint Petersburg to Kharkov in 1911 for work purposes. His father had built a house for the family in the village of Yuzhny (later known as Pivdenne), but his mother decided it would be better to give birth in Kharkov, where there were doctors and hospitals. His paternal grandmother, Zabel (1858–1926), was a stage actress of national repute in Armenia.
Growing up in Yuzhny, Knorozov developed a close affinity with cats, which was to last his whole life. At school, he 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 five, 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 and literature.
In 1940, at the age of 17, Knorozov left Kharkov 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.
Military service and the "Berlin Affair"
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 in German-occupied territories, where he could be forced to support the Nazi war effort. Knorozov managed to avoid that fate by moving from village to village, while earning a 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. 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 job as 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. 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, 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.
Although many details of Knorozov's life during the war remained unclear, his student Galina Yershova 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 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, Sevyan Vainshtein, Knorozov was entirely devoting himself to studies. 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.
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. 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. 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.
In 1952, the then 30-year-old Knorozov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Древняя письменность Центральной Америки, 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. Knorozov'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 did not exist.