[Maya LT Crack Code
Kody Coste
Widely viewed as one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, which peaked around A.D. 250-900, the Maya people of Mesoamerica are known to have been great astronomers who also developed sophisticated methods of agriculture and architecture. They built major cities with stone buildings and huge pyramid temples whose vestiges can still be found in one continuous territory that now lies in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and the western part of Honduras.
Despite being studied for generations, there were many gaps in our knowledge of Mayan history that were not filled until the deciphering of the Maya's strange writings, whose mysteries were finally unraveled by a Soviet academic who was born near Kharkiv, 100 years ago this week.
"Yuri Knorozov was an integral part of the decipherment process of the Maya script," said Harri Kettunen, an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at the University of Helsinki and president of the European Association of Mayanists, who says the Ukrainian-born Russian linguist is now "popularly regarded as the man who single-handedly cracked the Maya code."
Knorozov, however, made a major breakthrough by providing compelling evidence that many of the Mayan glyphs were syllabic in nature, representing sounds rather than ideas and that these syllables could be used to decipher words and their meanings.
Although a combination of Cold War politics and academic rivalry meant that it took decades before his work was widely accepted, Knorozov's research is now lauded for the role it played in uncovering the secrets of the Maya.
"He was the first person to successfully demonstrate the phonetic nature of Mayan hieroglyphic writing," Kettunen told RFE/RL by e-mail. "However, it took a while before his work was acknowledged on the other side of the Iron Curtain."
Indeed, the story of how one lone scholar from the Soviet Union managed to convince the wider world that he had cracked the code of the Maya without actually setting foot in the Americas is now the stuff of academic legend, not least because -- like the ancient culture he studied -- Knorozov's life is shrouded in mystery, particularly when it comes to his formative years in Ukraine.
"From what I've learned, Knorozov wasn't the easiest student in school," said Kettunen, who interviewed the Soviet scholar one year before his death in 1999. "He had a will of his own and was described as eccentric. However, teachers apparently recognized his intelligence and artistic skills, including playing the violin and writing poetry."
Not long afterward, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, although his fragile health meant he was deemed unfit for military service. During the German occupation of eastern Ukraine in 1941, Kettunen says Knorozov spent some time living "in his native village...and its surroundings, hiding from mobilizations, trying to provide for his family -- and immerse himself in Egyptian hieroglyphs when he could."
In 1943, he traveled with his father and mother to the Russian capital, where he was able to resume his studies in Egyptology at Moscow State University (MSU). After allegedly being denounced for hiding in the occupied territories, he was later conscripted to the army in March 1944 but managed to get enlisted in a noncombat unit near Moscow, where he served as a telephone operator until 1945.
After the war, Knorozov resumed his studies and lived the somewhat ascetic existence of a devoted scholar, focusing on Egyptology and Sinology while also becoming interested in other ancient writing systems, as well as East Asian scripts and literature.
Nonetheless, the head of the Department of Ethnology at MSU was skeptical of the idea that the Maya script could be deciphered and -- coupled with the suspicion that hung over Knorozov because he had lived in the occupied territories during the war -- this meant that he was not recommended for a graduate program.
Luckily, with the help of Tokarev, he was able to continue his studies by wangling a post as a junior researcher with the Institute of Ethnology in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad, and he applied himself to unpuzzling the Mayan script in his spare time.
Besides the reproduction of the Mayan codices from the Berlin library, Knorozov was also aided in his endeavor by a manuscript written by Diego de Landa, the Catholic bishop of Yucatan in the 16th century.
As a religious zealot who had often used brutal methods to convert the local Maya population who still lived in the region, while also destroying priceless Maya artifacts and texts, Landa somewhat paradoxically provided invaluable insights about the Maya by writing an Account Of The Affairs Of Yucatan (Relacin de las cosas de Yucatn), which contained information on their culture and writing system.
By a quirky twist of fate, it was a Russian-born U.S. archaeologist whose family chose to remain in the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution who was to play a key role in validating the work of the scholar in Leningrad.
Making use of Knorozov's work on interpreting Maya texts, Tatiana Proskouriakoff came up with her own "structural method" to demonstrate that inscriptions found on their monuments recorded historical events and didn't just contain calendric and astronomical information. She proved that many of these writings recounted the lives of ruling monarchs and dynastical timelines, thereby helping the story of the Maya enter written human history in one fell swoop.
Nonetheless, despite these detractors, Kettunen also stresses that there is no doubt that this maverick scholar from Kharkiv help kick-start "one of the great paradigm shifts in the field of humanities of the 20th century."
NARRATOR: Imagine explorers arriving to find our citiesdeserted; our books have perished in some unknown catastrophe; all that is leftto speak for us are the written words we have carved in stone. The travelers cannotmake sense of our mysterious script, but if they could, would they comprehendwho we were?
Inthe jungles of southern Mexico and Central America, the ancient ruins of theMaya posed such a mystery. They revealed a civilization of stunning achievements,created in isolation from Europe and Asia. Their cities were full of strangeinscriptions, fantastic, twisting forms called hieroglyphs. They were carved onmonuments and objects, painted on pottery and written in bark-paper books.
DAVIDSTUART (Epigrapher, University of Texas atAustin): It became very clear tome that the real task of code-breaking was getting through this morass of thetangled visuals of the script.
NARRATOR: In the 16th century, the flames of the SpanishInquisition scorched the New World, decimating the Maya civilization. One blazewas ignited by Diego de Landa, a zealous friar, bent on destroying one of themost original writing systems ever invented, Maya hieroglyphics.
NARRATOR: Landa's mission was to convert the Maya toCatholicism in the Yucatan peninsula. Upon learning they were still makingofferings to ancient gods, he arrested and tortured thousands of Maya for"crimes of devil worship."
MICHAELCOE: Heinflicted a primitive inquisition on them that was incredible in its ferocity,at the same time...while destroying everything that he could find that was whathe would call superstition, in other words, a good part of their culture.
GEORGESTUART: So they had a great ceremony ofdestruction in the plaza and burned hundreds, maybe thousands of books. We willnever know. And, of course, out of all of that, only four books or partialbooks survived.
MICHAELCOE: Thewriting system totally died out in the centuries that followed the Spanishconquest. I mean, people were probably burned at the stake for writing in theold system. By the 18th century, I don't think anybody could write.
Todayin the highlands of Guatemala, Maya villagers still make offerings to ancientgods. They seek guidance about favorable days for planting and harvesting,business and travel, courtship and marriage. Although they hold onto theirheritage, the Maya have been a people cut off from the written words of theirancestors.
WILLIAMFASH (Archeologist, Harvard University):The hieroglyphic records have so manystories to tell about just who the actors were on the stage of Maya history andwhat the major events were.
SIMONMARTIN (Epigrapher, University ofPennsylvania Museum): This isour one and only opportunity to peer into the Americas before the arrival ofEuropeans and hear these people speaking to us.
NARRATOR: Since ancient times, the Maya have lived in aregion that extends from southern Mexico through much of Central America. Theheart of their civilization lay between the highlands of Guatemala and theplains of the Yucatan, much of it a vast region of dense jungle.
Almost1,000 years later, a Spanish explorer named Jose Calderon stumbled upon thejungle city of Palenque. Inside its abandoned temples, Calderon and his menfound huge stone tablets carved with figures and hieroglyphic writing.
DAVIDSTUART: It'sreally clear that they're looking at something that's totally aliento them, and they're wrestling with this idea, whether it's picturewriting or whether it's something more than that.
NARRATOR: As news of the strange texts spread, Frenchartist Jean-Frederick Waldeck traveled to Palenque, in 1832, to sketch itshieroglyphs. Believing that Babylonians, Phoenicians or Hindus had built theMaya cities, Waldeck's drawings even included Indian elephants.
DAVIDSTUART: We nowknow that the Maya weren't even writing anything that visually lookedlike an elephant. He was not understanding the forms of the signs. This is thetheme that you see time and time again with artists trying to record Mayainscriptions, up until the 20th century.
WILLIAMFASH: Yousee these lovely photographs with the entire great plaza cleared. Well, itwasn't that way when he got there. He had to set a lot of people to work,clearing these areas, so that he could get decent photographs.
795a8134c1