Yuri Knorozov (Soviet) & Mayan decipherment
Order of the Aztec Eagle, Order of the Quetzal
The Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor given by Mexico to a foreigner was awarded to Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov in 1995.
Knorozov a Soviet linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer played a pivotal role1 in the decipherment of the Maya script. 2 He was also awarded the Order of the Quetzal by the President of Guatemala (1991) and the USSR State Prize in 1977.
The dramatic story of Knorozov as a soldier in the Red Army (May 1945) saving a book from the burning Prussian State Library (Preußische Staatsbibliothek; now the Berlin State Library) containing reproductions of three Maya codices —the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices— is recounted in an award winning film, Breaking the Mayan Code.
This account was clarified by Knorozov in a 1998 interview:3
Serving in the Soviet forces as an artillery spotter during the Great Patriotic War from 1943 until 1945, Knorozov was also one of the soldiers to enter the capital of the Thousand Year Reich, Berlin. There he, among other comrades, visited the National Library, where they ran into boxes full of books waiting in vain to be sent somewhere else in Germany as ordered by the "fascist command", as Dr. Knorozov put it.
The boxes were eventually sent to Moscow, where Knorozov continued his studies and research after the war. In one of the boxes he found a reproduction of the three Códices mayas by J. Antonio and Carlos A. Villacorta (1930).
In 1952, at age 33, Knorozov broke the Maya code while sitting at his desk in the Institute of Ethnography on the bank of the Neva River. Yale anthropologist Michael D. Coe has observed, “it is truly astonishing that Knorozov accomplished that extraordinary mental feat never having seen “a Maya ruin, or stood in the plazas and courts of Copán, Tikal, Palenque, or Chichén Itzá; or even touched a real Maya inscription.” In the history of decipherment, Coe writes, “Knorozov ranks with the great Jean-François Champollion, the French genius who ‘cracked’ the Egyptian script in the early nineteenth century.”4
Monuments to Knorozov (with cat) 5 :
Breaking the Mayan Code and Yuri Knorosov:
Knorozov, Youri V., and Sidney Alexander. 1962. “The Problem of Deciphering Mayan Writing.” Diogenes 10 (40): 122–28.
Y. V. Knorozov, and Sophie D. Coe. 1958. “The Problem of the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphic Writing.” American Antiquity 23 (3): 284–91.
Kettunen, Harri J. (1998a). "Relación de las cosas de San Petersburgo: An interview with Dr. Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov, Part I". Revista Xaman. Helsinki: Ibero-American Center, Helsinki University. 3/1998.
Bartley, Russell H. 2018. “The Cold War and Latin American Area Studies in the Former USSR: Reflections and Reminiscences.” Latin American Perspectives 45 (4): 115–40.