Yuri Knorozov - the genius of deciphering ancient civilizations

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922-1999). Founder of the Soviet school of Mayan studies, who deciphered the writing of the Maya Indians, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chevalier of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (Mexico) and the Great Gold Medal (Guatemala).

He penetrated the secrets of ancient civilizations

The 95th anniversary of the birth of the St. Petersburg historian, ethnographer and linguist Yuri Knorozov. Apart from narrow specialists, very few people in Russia know him. However, he was a great scientist, awarded the highest orders of foreign states. In Guatemala, he was considered almost a god, he was the only Russian to whom a monument was erected in distant Mexico City. But in the city where he worked, he doesn't even have a memorial plaque …

Yuri Valentinovich was born in a family of Russian intellectuals, in a village near Kharkov in November 1922. As a child, he played the violin superbly, wrote poetry and showed great ability to draw, depicted objects with photographic accuracy. He graduated from the 7th grade of the railway school, and then the workers' school. According to the recollections of friends, in his youth Knorozov received a strong blow to the head with a croquet ball. As a result, he suffered a concussion, and miraculously managed to save his eyesight. Jokingly, he later said that his linguistic abilities were the result of this trauma, and therefore future deciphers of ancient scripts should be "kicked in the head - it's only a matter of the correct method."

Before the war, Knorozov completed two courses in the history department of Kharkov University. I spent almost the entire scholarship on books, and then borrowed from everyone for food, eating bread and water. But then the war broke out. Knorozov was recognized as not liable for military service for health reasons, and in September 1941 he was sent to the Chernigov region to build defensive structures, he ended up in the occupation. After the liberation of these territories by the Red Army, he was again declared unfit for military service due to an extreme degree of dystrophy. In the fall of 1943, Knorozov issued a transfer to the history department of Moscow State University and continued his studies in the second year of this university, at the department of ethnography. At the University, Knorozov was able to realize his passion for the history of the Ancient East, ethnography and linguistics. In March 1944, he was still drafted into the army. He served in the school of junior specialists-repairmen of automobile parts. The victory was met by a telephone operator of the 158th artillery regiment of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command. He was awarded the medal "For the victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945."

In October 1945, Knorozov was demobilized and returned to the university to study the department of ethnography. Then working in the Moscow branch of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology named after V. I. N. N. Miklouho-Maclay of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Knorozov spent several months in the Uzbek and Turkmen SSR.

The civilization of the Maya people, who lived on the territory of present-day Mexico, is one of the most mysterious civilizations that have existed on the planet. The high level of development of medicine, science, architecture is amazing. One and a half thousand years before Columbus discovered the American continent, the Maya people had already used their hieroglyphic writing, invented the calendar system, were the first to use the concept of zero in mathematics, and the counting system was in many ways superior to that used by their contemporaries in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece. The ancient Indians possessed information about space, amazing for that era. Scientists still cannot understand how the Mayan tribes received such accurate knowledge in astronomy long before the invention of the telescope. The artifacts discovered by scientists pose new questions, the answers to which have not yet been found. In the X century, this civilization began to fade away and scientists still argue about the reasons for this. For a long time, the Mayan language was also a mystery. The Soviet scientist Yuri Knorozov took on the task of solving it.

This was not easy to do. Knorozov was informed that he could not apply for graduate school in Moscow, since he and his relatives were in the occupied territory. Yuri Valentinovich moved to Leningrad and became an employee of the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, where he was engaged, in his own words, "rough museum work without pretensions." In parallel, work was underway to decipher the Mayan writing. From 1953 until his death, the scientist worked at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Scientific sensation

Knorozov compiled a catalog of Mayan hieroglyphs and, after hard work, by 1952 was able to establish the phonetic reading of some of them. When he began to defend his dissertation on this topic for the degree of candidate of historical sciences, his report lasted only three minutes, after which the 30-year-old applicant was unanimously awarded the degree of doctor of historical sciences. As they said, before the defense, Knorozov seriously feared arrest. Marx says that the ancient Maya "did not have a state," but the Russian scientist argued the opposite. So he could well be suspected of "revising Marxism", which at that time was a terrible crime. However, sedition either did not notice, or no one simply reported …

Knorozov's work became a scientific and cultural sensation in the Soviet Union. Very quickly, they learned about the decryption abroad, giving rise to a storm of emotions among foreign experts: delight mixed with envy. American science, which delegated several hundred scientists to study the Mayan writing, was generally shocked. They did not understand how a person who had never seen the subject of his research with his own eyes could create such a brilliant work.

But during the Soviet era, Knorozov was long considered "restricted to travel abroad." To the invitations, knowing that he would not be released anyway, he diplomatically answered: “I am an armchair scientist. There is no need to climb the pyramids to work with texts. " Nevertheless, Knorozov was awarded the USSR State Prize for the complete translation of Mayan hieroglyphic manuscripts. And the scientist managed to visit South America only when the USSR began to collapse. In 1990, when Knorozov was already 68 years old, he was personally invited by the President of Guatemala and presented with the Grand Gold Medal. In Mexico, he was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, which is awarded to foreigners for exceptional service to the state. Just before his death, Knorozov received an honorary award from the United States. Before his trip to Mexico, the scientist stated that he knew all the archaeological sites from his publications. However, having reached the top of the pyramid, Knorozov stood alone for a long time and smoked one cigarette after another … Since 1995, he has repeatedly been to Mexico, visited the most cherished places of the Maya. At the end of his life, fate gave him the opportunity to live on the coast in a tropical jungle near the Caribbean Sea with the Mayan Indians and a stone's throw from the ancient pyramids.

Asya the cat is his co-author

Since childhood, the genius scientist had a stubborn, quarrelsome character, they even wanted to expel him from school for bad behavior. But he had a phenomenal memory and could quote whole pages from books. Knorozov lived right where he worked. In the Kunstkamera he was given a small room, which was filled with books. There was also a desk and a bunk filled with a simple soldier's blanket, and Mayan hieroglyphs hung on the walls. He did not have a family, and friends said that Knorozov drank a lot … However, the scientist worked tirelessly and studied the Mayan culture, compiled a dictionary, translated books until the last days of his life.

According to the recollections of his acquaintances, in appearance he seemed stern and sullen, but both children and animals were always and everywhere drawn to him. And he himself was especially fond of cats, which he considered animals "sacred and inviolable." It is curious that when Knorozov was only five years old, the first story he wrote was dedicated to a domestic cat.

The most famous representative of this genus was the blue-eyed Siamese cat Asya (Aspid), who had a kitten named Fat Kys. Asya Knorozov quite "seriously" represented as a co-author of his theoretical article devoted to the problem of signaling and speech, and was indignant at the fact that the editor who was preparing the article for publication had removed the cat's name from the title. The portrait of Tolstoy Kys, who was able to catch a pigeon on the window in infancy, always occupied the most honorable place on his desk.

In the famous photograph, the scientist is depicted with his beloved Asya in his arms. The photo is unusual. Animal lovers are well aware of the fact that over time, pets become similar to their owners, but here, as one of Knorozov's biographers noted with surprise, “we see an incredible similarity! As if not a man with a cat in his arms is looking at us, but a single, integral entity, part of which is embodied in a person, and part in a cat. Asya was a co-author of Yuri Valentinovich by no means figuratively: observing how a cat communicates with its kittens, he tested his assumptions on the theory of signaling in practice.

Friends of the scientist noticed that Yuri Valentinovich, sometimes without realizing it himself, began to behave like a cat. He avoided people who were unpleasant to him, tried not to talk or even look at them. And in conversations with friends, he could suddenly express his emotions through meowing of different shades or, for example, the most real cat hiss. He believed that this allows a more expressive expression of the attitude towards the interlocutor. People who had little knowledge of the scientist were sometimes perplexed by this style of communication, but real friends were not surprised, realizing that geniuses are sometimes allowed what is not befitting mere mortals.

As if vanished into thin air …

The special treatment of cats was not the only oddity of the genius. The well-known St. Petersburg scientist and writer Yevgeny Vodolazkin cites in his book “The Kunstkamera in the Faces” such episodes from his life: “His presence turned routine things into unforgettable events. So, at the end of one of the Moscow conferences, the staff of the Kunstkamera went to the Leningradsky railway station. We decided to get there in a taxi. Once in the car, colleagues discovered the absence of Yuri Valentinovich. Since he was catching a taxi with the others, everyone jumped out of the car and rushed to look for him. The Mayan culture specialist, who had been standing by the taxi a minute ago, seemed to vanish into thin air. After a thorough search, the inevitable decision was made to go to the station. At the station, Yuri Valentinovich got out of the car along with everyone. He made this way in the trunk …"

“Another story was related to Knorozov’s dislike of communicating with journalists. It is worth noting that they wanted to constantly interview the decipher of the mysterious letters. Once the director of the Kunstkamera managed to persuade him to give an interview to a newspaper. For a meeting with the journalist, Yuri Valentinovich was given a solid room - the office of the famous ethnographer Dmitry Alekseevich Olderogge. Entering the office first, Knorozov closed the door behind him with a key. The journalist smiled perplexedly. Condescending to the costs of genius, the headmistress knocked lightly on the door. Then stronger. Yuri Valentinovich was asked to open the door and was even slightly chided. They asked at least to respond, but silence was their answer. When they brought in a spare key and unlocked the door, it turned out that there was no one in the room. The sash of the open window, as the novelists of earlier years would have said, creaked doomedly in the wind. Olderogge's office was in the mezzanine, which, in fact, determined the course of thought of Yuri Valentinovich. Interestingly, the police entered Olderogge's office together with the management. Seeing as a man jumped out of the Kunstkamera window, one of the passers-by showed vigilance ….

And therefore, probably, the attitude towards Knorozov on the part of the authorities during his lifetime was always cool.

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