Yuri Walentinowitsch Knorosow

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Yuri Walentinowitsch Knorosow ( Russian Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов ; born November 19, 1922 in Piwdenne near Kharkov ; † March 30, 1999 in Saint Petersburg ) was a Soviet Egyptologist who in 1952 presented a phonetic approach to deciphering the Maya script .

Life

As a young soldier, Knorosow was involved in the invasion of the Red Army in Berlin in 1945 . In the holdings of the Berlin Prussian State Library he found a. a. the reproduction of the Mayan manuscript Dresden Codex and a copy of the book Relación de las cosas de Yucatán by Diego de Landa . Knorosow took both with him to the USSR and made the deciphering of Mayan hieroglyphs on the subject of his diploma thesis at the Lomonossow University in Moscow with Sergei Pavlovich Tolstow , which was published in the magazine Sovetskaya Etnografija in 1952. In 1955, after defending his dissertation on Diego de Landas Relación de las cosas de Yucatán , he received his doctorate in history as a historical-ethnographic source . He worked at the Moscow Miklucho Maklai Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN-SSSR, since 1991 Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN)). Margarita Fyodorovna Albedil , Galina Gavrilovna Yershova and Irina Konstantinovna Fyodorova were among his students .

Knorosow recognized that the Maya script had about the same number of characters as the Middle Egyptian. He also suspected that Diego de Landa had not understood the principle of a syllabary and that the so-called Landa alphabet therefore listed many characters several times. The symbol for chikin ( west ) was known to the researchers. Knorosow showed that one character can be read chi and the other is the logogram for kin ( sun ).

In Codex Madrid , Landa's ku symbol appears together with chi above the image of the vulture god. Since Geier is called kuch in Yukatek , the glyph sequence must be read ku-ch (i) .

JES Thompson , the leading British Mayan archaeologist and epigraph of the 1950s and 1960s, dismissed Knorosov's findings as Marxist propaganda and ensured that the majority of Knorosov's work was not taken seriously in the West. After Thompson's death, however, Knorosov's assumptions gradually gained acceptance and formed the basis for further deciphering. For his services to the deciphering of the Maya script, he received the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government .

Works

  • Drevnyaya pis'mennost 'Tsentral'noy Ameriki . In: Sovetskaya Etnografiya. Volume 3, 1952, pp. 100-118.
  • La antigua escritura de los pueblos de America Central. Biblioteca Obrera / Akademia Nauk USSR, Mexico City / Moscow 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 Archeology and Ethnology. Volume IV). 1967.

literature

  • Michael D. Coe: The Secret of Maya Script. A code is decrypted . Reinbek: Rowohlt 1995

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Albedil MF, Jerschowa GG, Fjodorowa IK: Юрий Валентинович Кнорозов (1922–1999): Некролог . In: Kunstkammer : Etnografitscheskije Tetradi: 1998 . No. 12 , 1999, p. 427-428 ( [1] [accessed March 6, 2020]).
personal data
SURNAME Knorosow, Yuri Walentinowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Кнорозов, Юрий Валентинович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet Egyptologist who presented a phonetic approach to deciphering Mayan script in 1952
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Piwdenne
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1999
Place of death St. Petersburg