Leningrader who solved the mystery of the Mayan civilization

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

The man who made a miraculous discovery, glorified Soviet science and became a national hero of Mexico, at the end of the "dashing 90s" died alone in a hospital bed exposed in the corridor …

The Maya Indians are one of the great mysteries of humanity. In the swampy jungles of the Central American Yucatan Peninsula, they independently created a powerful, distinctive civilization that flourished in the 3rd-10th centuries AD, and then, for unknown reasons, abandoned their cities and temples, turning into poor farmers.

In the 16th century, a significant part of the Mayan cultural heritage was destroyed by the Spanish conquerors. The bishop of Yucatan Diego de Landa, who sent a huge number of Indian manuscripts to the stake, was especially zealous in this sense.

However, de Landa himself partially made up for this loss for world science by writing a unique scientific treatise "Communication on the affairs of the Yucatan", in which he summarized what he knew about the Indians. De Landa's book played an important role in the story that will now be discussed.

Despite all the efforts of the conquistadors and inquisitors, several Mayan books have survived to this day. From the beginning of the 19th century, European scientists began to show serious interest in them and even try to decipher them, but all their efforts were in vain. They did not go further than the interpretation at the level of individual signs (and even then, based on conjectures). In the twentieth century, this work sharply intensified, but still at first did not bear much fruit. In the end, the famous American scientist Eric Thompson categorically stated that Mayan hieroglyphs are not writing in our usual sense, but a set of symbols, each of which expresses a certain idea, and therefore there is simply no chance of deciphering them. Anyone who dared to argue with Thompson was subjected to ruthless persecution in Western science. Until the time when the Soviet scientist Yuri Knorozov got down to business …

Knorozov was born in 1922 in the town of Yuzhny near Kharkov. Even his date of birth is shrouded in mystery. According to the documents, it falls on November 19, while Knorozov himself said that he was born on August 31. From an early age, Yuri was a real encyclopedist - he demonstrated success in the humanities and natural sciences at the same time, played the violin, painted, wrote poetry. At the age of five, he was hit in the head with a croquet ball while playing, after which he temporarily lost his sight almost completely. In the future, he will jokingly call it "witchcraft trauma", which gave him special abilities.

Before the war, Knorozov entered the history department of Kharkov University, but could not graduate from the university because of the Nazi aggression. At the first opportunity, Yuri fled from the German occupation to the Voronezh region, where he was declared unfit for military service due to poor health and worked as a teacher for some time. In 1943, Knorozov officially transferred to the history faculty of Moscow University, and in 1944 he was drafted into the army, but did not get to the front, having received distribution first to the school of junior specialists for automotive parts, and then to the 158th artillery regiment of the reserve of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. He met victory near Moscow (although there is a legend in the media about his alleged participation in the storming of Berlin). Knorozov refused to continue his military studies and officer shoulder straps, and immediately after the war he returned to scientific activities. He has long been interested in shamanic practices, so he devoted his thesis to Central Asian shamanism.

But soon the main direction of Yuri's scientific work changed radically. He had previously been interested in the history of the Maya Indians, but then he came across an article by Paul Schellhas "Deciphering the Mayan Letter - an Insoluble Problem."Knorozov decided to prove, guided by his own words, that "everything created by one human mind can be deciphered by another."

Due to the fact that Knorozov's relatives were in the Nazi-occupied territory of the Soviet Union, he was not given a post-graduate course. Instead, the young scientist went to work at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR in Leningrad. In the building of the museum itself, Yuri lived and worked on deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphs. Later he transferred to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), where he worked for the rest of his life.

Western scholars believed that several conditions had to exist for deciphering ancient texts (texts of sufficient length, a known language, the presence of "bilingual" monuments, toponyms and names of rulers, illustrations to the text). Knorozov had far from all of the above, and therefore decided to go the other way. He analyzed the frequency of the use of various signs, compared the results with languages related to the Maya, used the "alphabet" written by de Landa, which most scientists considered erroneous and completely useless. Yuri realized that the Indians with whom the bishop of Yucatan spoke, wrote down to him how they heard the names of various letters of the Spanish alphabet. Based on this, Knorozov continued his analysis and won! Most of the Mayan signs were syllabic!

The discovery of the Soviet ethnographer became one of the most outstanding achievements in world science. Knorozov significantly surpassed even Champollion, who deciphered the ancient Egyptian writing. After all, he, at least, had a text written in several languages at once …

By 1955, Knorozov had prepared a dissertation for the degree of candidate of sciences. How the Soviet scientific community would react to it, the scientist did not know - after all, Friedrich Engels believed that the Maya did not have a state, and the "phonetic" writing, according to the classic of Marxism, could arise exclusively in the state.

Knorozov initially did not even want to make a traditional presentation at his defense, referring to the fact that everything necessary to understand his research is already in the text of the dissertation. When colleagues began to insist, he spoke, but with a report for only three and a half minutes. What happened next, he clearly did not expect. No one began to criticize him for a correspondence dispute with Engels; instead, the commission voted unanimously to award him the degree not of a candidate, but immediately of a doctor of sciences, which happened extremely rarely. A scientist from Leningrad, without even leaving for Mexico, managed to create a real scientific sensation (in the West this was considered nonsense).

Some Western Americanists initially met Knorozov's discovery with hostility, however, having studied the materials, they were soon forced to agree with his conclusions.

In 1975, Knorozov published a complete translation of the Maya texts, and two years later he received the USSR State Prize.

The scientist was not going to stop there. Having dealt with the Mayan hieroglyphs, he began work on deciphering other ancient writing systems, semiotics, American studies, collective theory and brain evolution, looking through the prism of civilizations for general patterns in human development …

For several decades, Knorozov visited abroad only once - in 1956, at a congress of fellow Americanists in Copenhagen. According to one version, he was not released because of his stay in the occupied territories, according to the other, because of problems with alcohol that arose from time to time.

Like, probably, all geniuses, Yuri Valentinovich had a complex character. Sincere kindness was combined in him with isolation and even some rudeness arising from his sincerity and straightforwardness. Knorozov has always loved cats. Having received the apartment the doctor was supposed to do, the first thing he did was get a fluffy companion. Having watched for a long time how cats interact with each other, the scientist put his cat Asya as a co-author of an article on signaling systems, and was outraged when the name of his "assistant" was blotted out by the editor.

In 1990, Yuri Valentinovich's dream came true to see with his own eyes Central America, for which he did so much. The Maya deciphering raised the self-awareness of Mesoamericans and made their countries more tourist-friendly. Knorozov was first awarded the Grand Gold Medal of the President of Guatemala, and then the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest distinction awarded to foreigners for services to Mexico or all of humanity.

In 1998, the scientist made his last visit to Mexico and visited the States. A year later, in March 1999, after a stroke, he was left alone in a St. Petersburg hospital and was put on a bed in the corridor, where he died from developing pulmonary edema. According to Knorozov's disciples, even his daughter was able to find a hospital only on the third day … The death of the greatest scientist came exactly 44 years and 1 day after his triumphant presentation at the defense of the dissertation …

A monument to the scientist who read the Mayan letters was erected in 2012 in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.