Yuri Knorozov

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922 to 1999) was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigraphist and ethnologist, best known for the key role he played in the decipherment of the Maya script. Born in Kharkov, he began his studies at Moscow State University in 1940, specializing first in Egyptology, and after the war completed his course in the department of Ethnography while working at the Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1952 he published a paper arguing that early scripts such as Egyptian and Cuneiform contain a significant phonetic component, and he treated the glyphs of Diego de Landa's so called alphabet as a syllabary. The approach was at first sharply criticised by the Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson but later made the modern decipherment possible. His wider interests included archaeology, semiotics, human migration to the Americas and the evolution of the mind. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1999.