Time Line of Decipherment
1952
The
sounds of the glyphs
While
glyph studies languished in the West, a Russian linguist in Moscow was making
his own groundbreaking discoveries. In 1952, Yuri Knorosov (above) postulated
that the individual symbols in Maya glyphs stood for phonetic sounds, much like
English letters do. Knorosov knew that Maya had too many glyphs to be a true
alphabet but too few for each glyph to symbolize an entire word. (Maya's
800-plus glyphs compare to the several thousand characters of Chinese, for
example.) He determined that written Maya, like Egyptian hieroglyphics,
contained a combination of these elements. Because "west," in
spoken Maya, is "chik'in," and "k'in" is
the word for sun, the hand represents the syllable "chi," as
Knorosov concluded. Fortunately, American scholars Michael and Sophie Coe began
publishing Knorosov's papers in the U.S. in the late 1950s. Otherwise,
his important (though incomplete) findings might have been inaccessible to
Western scholars until the end of the Cold War.