Yuri Knorozov — linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer with roots in the USSR
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was born on 19 November 1922 in Kharkov, then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, according to most sources; other accounts place his birth in the nearby village of Yuzhny, now Pivdenne, where his father had built the family a house. His parents were Russian intellectuals who had moved from St Petersburg to Kharkov in 1911 for work; his paternal grandmother had been a well-known stage actress in Armenia.
He studied briefly in Kharkov before leaving in 1940, at seventeen, for Moscow State University, where he enrolled in the new department of ethnology. His studies were interrupted by the war, and accounts of his war years differ. In the autumn of 1945 he returned to the university, studied Egyptology and the writing systems of China, Japan and ancient India, and graduated in 1948. While helping to sort German archives brought to Moscow after the war, he came across a published edition of the Maya codices, and an article by the German scholar Paul Schellhas declaring the decipherment of the Maya script an insoluble problem, which he took as a challenge.
From 1948 he worked in Leningrad, first at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR and from 1953 at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Kunstkamera, of the Academy of Sciences. In an article published in Sovetskaya Etnografiya in 1952, he argued that the sixteenth-century 'alphabet' recorded by Bishop Diego de Landa was in fact a list of syllables, and that Maya writing combined logograms with phonetic signs, each standing for a consonant and a vowel. His doctoral dissertation (1955) and The Writing of the Maya Indians (1963) set out the system. Resistance from the leading Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson and Cold War suspicion delayed acceptance, but from the 1970s his phonetic approach, together with Tatiana Proskouriakoff's historical reading of the inscriptions, made it possible to read Maya texts in full. He also led work on Proto-Indian and Easter Island scripts, and received the USSR State Prize.
Long unable to travel abroad, he was invited in 1990 by President Vinicio Cerezo to Guatemala, and then visited Mexico, where he received the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the country's highest honour for foreigners. He died in St Petersburg at the end of March 1999, aged seventy-six. A monument to him stands in Mérida, Yucatán.
"Spent his career in the USSR, in Moscow and Leningrad; allowed to travel to Central America only in 1990, when he visited Guatemala and then Mexico."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) — or the nearby village of Yuzhny (Pivdenne)
Born in 1922 in or near Kharkov, then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, to a Russian family of intellectuals, he studied at Moscow State University and spent his working life at the Academy of Sciences' ethnographic institutions in Leningrad.
Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) — or the nearby village of Yuzhny (Pivdenne). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.