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.