Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov papers

Iurii Knorozov was born in 1922 in Khar'kov, Ukraine. His parents had Russian and Armenian roots and were members of the Soviet intelligentsia. By the time Knorozov graduated from high school, he spoke Russian, Ukrainian, and some German. In 1939, he was admitted to the Khar'kov State University where he majored in history.
Knorozov met the beginning of the war of 1941-1945 in the Ukraine. The country was soon occupied by the German army. Knorozov and his mother eventually managed to cross the battle lines back to the Soviet-controlled territory in 1943. Knorozov was then able to continue his undergraduate education at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). His college friends recalled that he was fascinated with writing systems and paleography, especially with Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1944, Knorozov entered the military service. After the end of the war in 1945, he went on to complete his undergraduate studies at the MSU. His thesis on the Shamun Nabi mausoleum and the associated oral and written tradition was based on his fieldwork in Xorazm (Khwarezm/Khorezm), Uzbekistan, as a member of the archaeological-ethnographic expedition of 1945-1948 directed by Sergei Tolstov. Knorozov's first publication in the Sovetskaia Etnografiia journal ("Soviet Ethnography") in 1949 was based on his undergraduate thesis.
In 1949, Knorozov moved to St. Petersburg. Thanks to the efforts of Sergei Tokarev, another of Knorozov's mentors at MSU, he was appointed junior research fellow at the Museum of the Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. About that time, Knorozov became increasingly fascinated with the problem of the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs. While studying the manuscript written by Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, that was supposed to be the main subject of his doctoral dissertation, he realized that the so-called "Landa’s alphabet" of Maya hieroglyphs contained readings of several syllabic signs. Knorozov then turned to the published Maya codices, identified the same signs in these manuscripts, and deciphered new syllables. He discovered that Maya writing was logo-syllabic and determined basic spelling rules.
The first results of Knorozov's decipherment were published in 1952 as an article in Sovetskaia Etnografiia. It was well-received by the Soviet academia. Tolstov and Tokarev then arranged Knorozov’s new research appointment at the Kunstkamera Museum which was affiliated with the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and obtained permission for Knorozov to defend his Ph.D. dissertation on Diego de Landa’s manuscript in 1955. The initial article on the decipherment was followed by a series of publications in Russian, Spanish, and English. In 1956, Knorozov participated in the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen where he presented his ideas to the international academic audience for the first time. Two later monographs – Pis'mennost' Indeitsev Maiia (The Writing of Maya Indians) published in 1963 and Ieroglificheskiie Rukopisi Maiia (Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts) published in 1975 – summarized Knorozov's work on the Maya writing system. Also in 1975, he received the prestigious Gosudarstvennaia Premiia ("National Fellowship") of the USSR for his contributions to Maya studies.
Knorozov's decipherment of Maya writing was met with strong opposition from several prominent Mayanists, particularly J. Eric S. Thompson and his students. However, several anthropologists, art historians, and linguists including Michael D. Coe, David Kelley, Floyd Lounsbury, and Tatiana Proskouriakoff corresponded with Knorozov and encouraged him. An abridged edition of Knorozov's Pis'mennost Indeitsev Maiia translated by Sophie Coe was published as Selected Chapters from the Writing of Maya Indians by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University in 1967. Epigraphers applied Knorozov's approach to Classic Maya inscriptions and deciphered additional signs. As more inscriptions were photographed, drawn, and published, the corpus of Maya logograms and syllables with known phonetic values grew exponentially.
As early as the mid-1950s, Knorozov also became interested in the decipherment of the Easter Island (Rongorongo) script. This work resulted in a number of articles, some of them written jointly with Nikolai Butinov and later with Irina Fedorova. Knorozov also contributed to the study of the Indus Script and published several reports and articles on this subject between 1965 and 1995. Nikolai Gurov was Knorozov's main collaborator in this research until the late 1970s. Subsequent publications on the Indus script were co- authored by Margarita Al'bedil'. During the 1960s-1970s, Knorozov's research interests extended into signaling theory and semiotics as he participated in the Linguistics section of the Research Council on Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Beginning in 1963, Knorozov headed a special research group dedicated to the decipherment of ancient scripts.
Knorozov's research on Maya writing in the 1980s and 1990s was shaped by collaboration with Galina Ershova, who co-authored a number of publications on Classic Maya inscriptions. In addition, he became fascinated with the topic of the peopling of the Americas. Knorozov took part in archaeological and ethnographic expeditions to the Kuril Islands. This research resulted in several publications on Ainu ethnography and archaeology.
In the 1990s, the Guatemalan and Mexican governments acknowledged Knorozov's contributions to Maya studies. He was presented with an honorary medal by the Guatemalan government during the 1990s and in 1994, the government of Mexico awarded him the Order of the Aztec Eagle. The 1990s was also the first time when Knorozov traveled to Mexico and Guatemala and visited several important Maya sites.
Knorozov died of pneumonia in St. Petersburg in 1999. He was survived by his daughter Ekaterina and granddaughter Anna.