22 Facts About Yuri Knorozov

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigraphist, and ethnologist.

Yuri Knorozov's parents were Russian intellectuals who had moved from Saint Petersburg to Kharkov in 1911 for work purposes.

Yuri Knorozov's father had built a house for the family in the village of Yuzhny, but his mother decided it would be better to give birth in Kharkov, where there were doctors and hospitals.

Yuri Knorozov's paternal grandmother, Zabel, was a stage actress of national repute in Armenia.

Yuri Knorozov's scores were excellent for all subjects, except for Ukrainian language and literature.

In 1940, at the age of 17, Yuri Knorozov left Kharkov for Moscow where he commenced undergraduate studies in the newly created Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University's department of History.

Yuri Knorozov managed to avoid that by moving from village to village, where he earned his living as a school teacher.

In 1943, Yuri Knorozov survived an outbreak of typhus, and in September of that year managed to escape with his family to Moscow.

Supposedly, when stationed in Berlin, Yuri Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze.

Yuri Knorozov resumed his research into Egyptology, and undertook comparative cultural studies in other fields such as Sinology.

Yuri Knorozov displayed a particular interest and aptitude for the study of ancient languages and writing systems, especially hieroglyphs, and he read medieval Japanese and Arabic literature.

Yuri Knorozov was perhaps not the first to propose a syllabic basis for the script, but his arguments and evidence were the most compelling to date.

Yuri Knorozov did not actually put forward many new transcriptions based on his analysis; nevertheless, he maintained that this approach was the key to understanding the script.

Yuri Knorozov's view was the prevailing one in the field, and many other scholars followed suit.

The situation was further complicated by Yuri Knorozov's paper appearing during the height of the Cold War, and many were able to dismiss his paper as being founded on misguided Marxist-Leninist ideology and polemic.

Indeed, in keeping with the mandatory practices of the time, Yuri Knorozov's paper was prefaced by a foreword written by the journal's editor which contained digressions and propagandist comments extolling the State-sponsored approach by which Yuri Knorozov had succeeded where Western scholarship had failed.

Yuri Knorozov further improved his decipherment technique in his 1963 monograph, "The Writing of the Maya Indians", and published translations of Mayan manuscripts in his 1975 work, "Maya Hieroglyphic Manuscripts".

Yuri Knorozov had presented his work in 1956 at the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen, but in the ensuing years he was not able to travel abroad at all.

Yuri Knorozov had broad interests in, and contributed to, other investigative fields such as archaeology, semiotics, human migration to the Americas, and the evolution of the mind.

Yuri Knorozov was survived by his daughter Ekaterina and granddaughter Anna.

Yuri Knorozov listed his cat Asya as a co-author on his work, but the editors always removed her.

Yuri Knorozov always used the photo with Asya as his author photo, and got annoyed when editors cropped her out.