Yuri Knorozov Begins to Decipher Maya Writing

In 1952, Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov published a paper titled "Ancient Writing of Central America" in the journal Sovetskaya Etnografiya, initiating a transformation in the study of Maya hieroglyphs. For decades, prevailing Western scholarship had largely treated the inscriptions as purely mystical, astronomical, or non-phonetic ideograms, assuming that the signs could not represent spoken language. Knorozov challenged this consensus by proposing that the script was logosyllabic, combining whole-word symbols with phonetic signs that represented specific consonant-and-vowel combinations.

A central component of Knorozov's argument was a reassessment of the sixteenth-century manuscript "Relación de las cosas de Yucatán" by the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa. During the early colonial period, de Landa had attempted to transcribe the Latin alphabet into native signs with the assistance of Maya informants, producing a glossary long known as the "de Landa alphabet." Because the characters did not correlate directly with Spanish letters, prominent early twentieth-century specialists, notably J. Eric S. Thompson, dismissed the record as meaningless nonsense. Knorozov recognized that the misunderstandings arose because de Landa had asked informants to write the names of Spanish letters rather than isolated sounds, prompting the scribes to produce syllabic characters to match those phonetic requests.