Tokens of Fate. To the 100th anniversary of Yuri Knorozov, a Soviet scientist who deciphered the Maya script

Russia and the land of the ancient Maya, encompassing Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, lie on different continents. This makes it even more fascinating that the first person to read the inscriptions made by the vanished civilization was a Russian ethnographer and linguist Yuri Knorozov, and he did it from his office without travelling to the far-away lands.

History Begins

When reading the biography of Yuri Knorozov, one may think that he was destined to make a breakthrough discovery. He was born on November 19, 1922, in the town of Yuzhny in the Kharkov governorate to an educated family that owned lots of books and engaged in music and drawing. At the age of ten, Yuri took part in a kid’s music contest and even received an honorary certificate. Later, he gave up on music and decided to become a psychiatrist. However, the war was looming at the time, and universities only trained military doctors, while Knorozov could not serve in the army due to health reasons. He abandoned his dreams of becoming a medic and enrolled in the History Department of the Kharkov University. He was forced to put his studies on hold when the war started and Kharkov was occupied by the Nazis, as he had to work to support his mother and sister. In 1943, the family moved to Moscow to join Yuri’s father and brother who worked there. Yuri transferred to the Moscow State University, but until 1945 he worked as a military telephone operator.

After the war ended, Yuri finally returned to his studies, specializing in ethnography. He soon came across an article by a German researcher Paul Schellhas, “Deciphering the Mayan Scripts — an Unsolvable Problem?” Yuri took that question as a personal challenge. He was convinced that “what was created by one human mind is bound to be solved by another.” Then, fate gave him another unexpected gift: among trophy books brought from Germany, he found the Report of the Affairs of Yucatan by the 16th-century Franciscan monk Diego de Landa and Maya Codices by the Villacorta brothers published in Guatemala. Since students of the History Department were often involved in arranging the archives, Knorozov was able to literally take the matter of deciphering Maya hieroglyphs into his own hands.

Voices from Remote Ages

The Maya civilization existed from 2000 BC until the 16th century when its natural deve­lopment was interrupted by the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Maya built cities of stone, and today many of them are UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Chichen Itza in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras. They made a calendar, studied astronomy, and knew hieroglyphic writing. Maya inscriptions were carved on wood and stone, made using stucco molding technique and written on paper: the already mentioned Maya Codices are manu­scripts written on pleated paper made of amate plant. Interestingly, the descendants of the legen­dary builders and astronomers still speak the Mayan language (which has naturally evolved over time), but they cannot read the ancient inscriptions. Even the manuscript of Diego de Landa, who made an attempt to record the letters of the Spanish alphabet with the Mayan hieroglyphs, does not provide a clue to their decryption. In the 1950s, the leading expect on Maya script was an English archaeologist Eric Thompson. He believed that hiero­glyphs represented symbols, not sounds, and therefore understanding the meaning of specific Mayan symbols was an unsolvable task. That’s when Yuri Knorozov comes into play with his faith in the power of the human mind.

Landmark Discovery

After graduation, Knorozov wanted to continue studying Mexico in postgraduate program. However, he was denied admission because he stayed in the occupied territory during the war. Knorozov’s supervisor, Sergei Tolstov, pulled some strings and landed him a job of a junior researcher at the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR in Leningrad. Knorozov moved there and continued to search for clues to Maya script. He came up with a brilliant idea that when Diego de Landa tried to write down a particular letter of the Spanish alphabet in the Mayan language he pronounced it out loud, and the local scribe wrote down the sound, not the letter, using the most appropriate hieroglyph. Thus, “K” turned into “ka,” and “L,” into “el.” In other words, the alphabet from de Landa’s manuscript contained syllabic symbols, not letters or ideographs. It was a major re­velation that enabled deciphering most Mayan texts.


What was created by one human mind is bound to be solved by another, a motto of Yuri Knorozov.


The first article on deciphering the Maya script was published in Soviet Ethnography journal in 1952, followed by a publication in Spanish in Mexico. These works allowed Knorozov to transfer to the America, Austra­lia, and Oceania department of Peter the Great’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, where he worked until his death in 1999. Three years after his discovery, Knorozov defended his dissertation titled “Report of the Affairs of Yucatan by Diego de Landa as a Historical and Ethnographic Source.” He was imme­diately awarded a doctoral degree, bypassing the candidate’s.

In 1977, Knorozov was awarded the USSR State Prize, with his contribution to science likened to the works of Jean-François Champollion, the famous decipherer of Ancient Egyptian writings. In the 1980s, he led a group of young scientists who studied various semiotic systems. The group has published collections of papers Ancient Writing Systems and three volumes of Issues of Ethnic Semiotics.

Knorozov’s discovery sparked a heated debate in the scientific community around the globe: Eric Thompson was skeptical about the achievements of his Soviet colleague and called Knorozov’s decryption a “Marxist trick and propaganda conspiracy.” But Knorozov’s breakthrough spoke for itself: using his method, scientists from all over the world could read the inscriptions and come to the same conclusions. Knorozov himself did not have the opportunity to travel abroad until the early 1990s, but many foreign researchers considered it an honor to visit the scientist in Leningrad.

I Always Remain a Mexican in My Heart

In the 1990s, Yuri Knorozov made his first trip to land of the Maya, first to Guatemala, and then to Mexico. There, he finally realized how famous he was: his public lectures gathered thousands, and many colleagues came just to take a look at the brilliant Russian who managed to decode the writings of the people who lived thousands of years ago on another continent without leaving his office. Knorozov was awarded the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle and the Guatemalan Order of the Quetzal. In 2012, a monument to Knorozov was erected in the Mexican city of Merida. The monument reproduces a black-and-white photo of the scientist with his beloved cat Asya. This was the gratitude of the descendants of the Maya people to the Russian scientist for bringing back the voices of their ancestors. Knorozov’s phrase that he said after being awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle is engraved on the pedestal: “I always remain a Mexican in my heart.” In 2022, the brilliant scientist has a double anniversary: 100 years since birth and 70 years since publication of the first article about deciphering of the Maya script. Who knows, perhaps this could become the reason to eternalize memory of Knorozov in Russia as well.

Tatiana Borisova