However, teachers apparently recognized his intelligence and artistic skills, including playing the violin and writing poetry." "He had a will of his own and was described as eccentric. "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 was born in 1922 to a family of Russian-Armenian heritage in the northeastern Ukrainian village of Pivdenne, where he was considered to have been an unruly but academically talented youth. 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. "However, it took a while before his work was acknowledged on the other side of the Iron Curtain." Shrouded In Mystery "He was the first person to successfully demonstrate the phonetic nature of Mayan hieroglyphic writing," Kettunen told RFE/RL by e-mail. 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.Īlthough 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. "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."īefore Knorozov published his seminal article Ancient Writing of Central America (Древняя письменность Центральной Америки) in the early 1950s, researchers had long been flummoxed by the Mayan script, which was widely thought to be a hieroglyphic system of enigmatic symbols and signs whose meaning had long been lost in the mists of time. 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.ĭespite 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. 250-900, the Maya people of Mesoamerica are known to have been great astronomers who also developed sophisticated methods of agriculture and architecture. Widely viewed as one of the greatest civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, which peaked around A.D. They were also well-respected and had their pictures painted on the walls of houses and monuments.The ancient script of the Maya baffled scholars for centuries. They didn't have to go into the military or pay taxes. Girls were not allowed to go to school so they couldn't become scribes. Only scribes learned to write them and they trained for years, starting school when they were boys. Hieroglyphics were extremely hard to learn. Scribes also used hieroglyphics on papyrus to record the history of Egypt. You can see hieroglyphics on ancient tombs, pyramid walls, pottery and ceramics. The only time hieroglyphics use vowels is when a word begins with one or if it might be confusing without them. In English, words are often abbreviated by leaving out the vowels - bldg = building, ltd = limited and cm = centimeter. Besides changing direction, hieroglyphics rarely used vowels, although they were spoken. The symbols ( human and animals) always face towards the beginning of the line so you know which direction to start reading. Hieroglyphics were written in rows or columns without spaces and can be read from left to right or from right to left. Hieratic was the script used for day-to-day writing. Hieroglyphics were the earliest form of writing in Egypt and were basically only used in formal settings. that represents a letter of their alphabet. Each hieroglyphic is a common object - a reed, an eagle, a basket, water, etc. Ancient Egyptians had more than 2,000 characters, which they called hieroglyphics. English has 26 characters (called letters) that are made up into words and then into sentences.
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