Yuri Knorozov

Yuri Valentinovich Knorosow (Russian Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов; born November 19, 1922 in the vicinity of Kharkov, † 30 March 1999, Saint Petersburg ) was a Soviet Egyptologist, in 1952 a phonetic approach to decipherment of Maya writing presented.

As a young soldier he was involved in 1945 when the Red Army in Berlin. In the collections of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, he found, inter alia, the reproduction of the Mayan Dresden Codex manuscript and a copy of the book Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, Diego de Landa. Knorosow took both with the USSR and made the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs on the subject of his doctoral thesis, which he published in the early 1950s.

Knorosow realized that the writing of the Maya has about the same number of characters as the means Egyptian. He also suspected that Diego de Landa did not understand the principle of a syllabary, and the so-called Landa alphabet is why many characters aufführte several times. The sign for chikin (west) was known to the researchers. Knorosow showed that this is to read a character chi, and the other is the logogram for kin ( sun).

In the Madrid Codex Landas ku sign appears along with chi on the image of the Vulture God. Because Vultures on Yukatek say kuch, the glyphs must therefore ku -ch ( i) to be read.

JES Thompson, the UK's leading Maya archaeologist and epigraph of the 1950s and 1960s, did Knorosows knowledge from as Marxist propaganda and sat through that work Knorosows in the West was hardly taken seriously. After Thompson's death, Knorosows assumptions translated but by gradually and formed the basis for further deciphering. For his contributions to the decipherment of Maya writing he received from the Mexican government, the Order of the Aztec Eagle.

Works

  • Drevnyaya pis'mennost ' Tsentral'noy Ameriki ( Ancient Writings of Central America). Sovetskaya Etnografiya 3 (1952 ), S 100-118.
  • La escritura antigua de los pueblos de America Central, Biblioteca Obrera / Akademia Nauk USSR, Mexiko-Stadt/Moskau 1954
  • Diego de Landa. Soobshchenie o delakh v Yukatani, 1566, Akademia Nauk USSR, Moscow 1956
  • Pis'mennost Indeitsev Maiia, Akademia Nauk USSR, Moscow 1963
  • The Writing of the Maya Indians (Russian Translation Series of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology IV ), 1967
Maya script Maya civilization Relación de las cosas de Yucatán Madrid Codex (Maya)
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