"A Triumph of Spirit" by Michael D. Coe in "Archaeology" (September/October 1991, pp. 39-44) The story of the Russian scholar Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov is a study in the triumph of spirit and intellect over almost insuperable odds. This great epigrapher, who until recently had never been permitted to leave the Soviet Union to visit a Mesoamerican site, who had never seen first-hand any of the great Maya inscriptions, cracked the phonetic code of Maya hieroglyphic writing in the confines of his Leningrad study. I first visited Knorosov with my Russian-speaking wife Sophie in 1969, during the grim, gray "years of stagnation" under Brezhnev. It was January, and it was bitterly cold in Leningrad. Knorosov's office was, and still is, located in the blue-and- white Kunstkammer, the baroque building on the Neva built to house Peter the Great's "cabinet of curiosities" (including the skeleton of his giant manservant). Here, Knorosov shared his modest office with four colleagues at the Ethnographic Institute--privacy of any kind is in short supply in the Soviet Union. In this crowded scene, our friend occupied a desk in the corner near a window, while the ever-present samovar bubbled away, the source of the tea without which Russian intellectual life would be unthinkable. I gazed in awe at the view from the window: beyond the frozen river, the feeble rays of the low-lying winter sun were picking out the golden Admiralty spire celebrated in Pushkin's poetry. It was a very far cry from the hot and humid forests in which the Maya cities had risen and died. Knorosov is a striking man, with iron-gray hair brushed back severely, and sapphire-blue eyes almost hidden beneath his bushy eyebrows. A formal dresser never to be seen on Leningrad's streets without brown beret, white shirt, and necktie, he wears his World War II battle medals, though he now omits the one bearing Stalin's portrait, proudly pinned to his double-breasted suit. A chain-smoker, Knorosov has a wonderfully ironic sense of humor, like may Russians who have survived the terrible events of this century. He is a mine of information on his beloved city, especially on its history under Peter the Great and his corrupt henchman Menshikov. Thanks to Knorosov's breakthrough in Maya epigraphy, we can now hear ancient Maya glyphs as the scribes wrote them, and not merely interpret them as soundless visual patterns. Knorosov's great achievement lay in demonstrating that the Maya scribes could, and often did, write syllabically, each glyph standing for a consonant followed by a vowel. Most Maya words are single syllables made up of a consonant-vowel-consonant combination. They were generally written with two glyphs, but the vowel of the second glyph was not pronounced. Basic to Knorosov's approach was his "Principle of Synharmony," according to which the silent second vowel in these combinations often repeats the vowel of the first glyphs. Hence, the word for the quetzal bird--a beautiful tropical species highly prized by the Maya for its ornate feathers--is the monosyllabic kuk, but was written with two ku glyphs, the second -u sound being suppressed. This approach is universally accepted today by all serious Mayanists, but it was initially rejected by the scholarly establishment here in the West. Indeed, all of Knorosov's work on Maya glyphs came under heated attack for many years from the dean of Maya studies, J. Eric Thompson, whose formidably influential views of the Maya held sway in the Americas for more than a generation. Thompson launched his relentless and often unfair rebuttal in cold war terms in the Mexican journal "Yan" in 1953. Indeed, until his death in 1975, Thompson rejected all of Knorosov's work, both in general and in detail. The very vehemence of his attack suggests that he might have had something to feat from Knorosov's quarter. The critical point in Knorosov's career occurred in 1947, when his teacher, the orientalist and archaeologist Sergei Tokarev, came to him with a proposal. Two years before, the respected German Mayanist Paul Schellhas, then near the end of his long life, had published a very pessimistic article stating that the decipherment of Maya glyphs was an unsolvable problem. Tokarev's challenge to his student was this: "If you believe that any writing system produced by humans can be read by humans, they why don't you try to read the Maya hieroglyphs?" Knorosov took up the challenge and turned it into his doctoral research, which would lead to his degree in historical sciences (magna cum laude) in 1955. The subject of Knorosov's groundbreaking study was the work of Fray Diego de Landa, the fanatical and cruel Spanish Franciscan missionary. Landa, who eventually became Provincial (ruling prelate) in Yucatan, both persecuted the Maya and recorded their customs and history. Famed for his complete mastery of the Maya tongue, he combated what he perceived to be widespread idolatry among his charges in 1552 by conducting an auto-da-fe. In the process, he did massive and irreparable damage to the Maya's written legacy by burning a large number of native Maya tests or codices "because they contained nothing but superstition and the Devil's falsehoods." Landa was recalled to Spain in 1564 to face charges that he had overstepped his authority in the investigation and torture of native lords and commoners. During his years of exile, he wrote an "Account of the Affairs of Yucatan," which, ironically, is our single most important Colonial-period source on the lowland Maya. The original has been lost, but a seventeenth-century abridgement was discovered in 1862 in Madrid by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg. This precious document not only provided detailed information on all aspects of Maya life on the eve of the conquest, it also--more important in this context--outlined the workings of the Maya calendar and gave the glyphs for the days and the months. Landa gave us something else that would prove decisive to Knorosov's breakthrough--a description of the Maya writing system itself, albeit one containing a crucial error. From material he had elicited from his informants, Landa pictured 27 signs that, to his mind, formed part of the Maya "alphabet," as well as three additional signs drawn from examples of how signs were strung together in written words and sentences. Early efforts at translating Maya glyphs based on Landa's interpretations ranged from the bad to the ridiculous. The phonetic approach remained in eclipse for almost a century, until Knorosov published his bombshell in the form of an article written in 1952. The article appeared in "Sovietskaya Etnografia", a journal in those days otherwise given over to praise of Marx, Engles, and, above all, Stalin. In this article, Knorosov rejected several basic conclusions to which Mayanists had adhered. To begin with, he refuted the evolutionary approach to the development of languages, a position embraced by important Maya scholars like Sylvanus Morley. This approach argues that writing had passed through various stages, beginning with the pictographic, then proceeding through the "ideographic" (in which an idea or object is given by a sign having little or no pictorial reference), and finally moving to the phonetic (in which a sign stands only for a sound). Wrong, said Knorosov. These supposed stages coexist in all early scripts, including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese, all of which, like the Maya system, are authentically hieroglyphic; they are typical of state societies in which they are maintained as a monopoly by a class of priestly scribes. In such systems, one finds "ideograms" that have both conceptual and phonetic value; phonetic signs; and "key signs" or determinatives, classificatory signs with conceptual value only that remain unpronounced. Knorosov then zeroed in on the Landa "alphabet," which he argued was not an alphabet at all but a syllabary--a list of signs standing for consonant-vowel combinations and not individual letters. (Landa himself recorded five of his "letters" as consonant-vowel combinations.) Knorosov claimed, for instance, that the sign given by Landa as the letter l actually represents the syllable lu. In this and a spate of other articles, Knorosov closely compared the texts with the pictures they accompany in the few surviving Maya codices, especially a manuscript known as the Dresden Codex; and he applied the Landa "alphabet" in light of his theoretical system. Despite the early attacks on his discoveries, Knorosov's logic proved compelling. Linguists and younger colleagues in the United States had a considerably less hostile reaction to Knorosov's work than people like Thompson; and in 1962 the important American epigrapher David Kelley published a paper accepting many, but not all, of Knorosov's readings. Kelley took the Russian's methodology one step further into the inscriptions, and read the syllabically written name of a great leader at Chichen Itza as Ka-ku-pa-ca-l(a) or Kakupacal, "Fiery Shield." It was a first for Maya studies, and the tide has never turned back. Knorosov's magnum opus, "Pis'mennost' Indietsav Maiia (The Writing of the Maya Indians)", appeared in 1963. This is an impressive volume covering all aspects of Maya history and anthropology, including a catalog of 540 basic Maya glyphs with their reading (if known) and interpretation. Four years later, Harvard's Peabody Museum published my wife's translation of it, with an appreciative but cautious preface by Tatiana Proskouriakoff. The Russian-born Proskouriakoff had broken new ground in 1960 when she published an article in "American Antiquity" demonstrating that a pattern of dates at Piedras Negras in Guatemala implied that the glyphic inscriptions there, and probably in other Maya cities, recorded actual human history rather than just astronomical and religious matters, as Thompson and other Mayanists had long contended. Proskouriakoff's immense prestige assured that this translation would receive serious scholarly attention. The volume was followed by a second major Knorosov work on the four Maya codices, also later published in translation. Meanwhile, a new generation of Maya epigraphers and linguists had appeared in the United States, Canada, Guatemala, and Western Europe, inspired by Knorosovian methodology, by Proskouriakoff's historical approach, and by the research of Floyd Lounsbury at Yale. Lounsbury set the pace by refining Knorosov's method of glyphic substitution (the search for signs used alternatively in identical contexts), and established new standards of proof for proposed new readings. The two new approaches, phoneticism and the historical approach, coalesced in 1973 at the groundbreaking first Mesa Redonda of Palenque. For the first time since the collapse of Classic Maya civilization in the ninth century A.D., the kings of Palenque, including Pacal the Great and his son Chan Bahlum, became real people with real histories. The final vindication for Knorosov came six years later at a conference entitled "Phoneticism in Maya Writing," attended by no less than 135 participants. Lyle Campbell, one of the organizers, stated in his opening paper: "No Mayan linguist who has seriously looked into the matter any longer doubts the phonetic hypothesis as originally framed by Yuri Knorosov." Knorosov has not bee idle since the days of his early successes. Since then, he and his Soviet colleagues have done important work on those stubbornly recalcitrant writing systems, the Rongo-rongo script of Easter Island and the Indus script, both of which Yuri Valentinovich sees (despite the brevity of the texts and other related problems) as being of the "hieroglyphic" type. Each summer he travels to the distant, windswept Kurile Islands between Siberia and Japan, where he excavates middens left by the ancestors of the Ainu people. Since these disputed islands, seized from Japan at the end of World War II, are in a military zone, he and his fellow archaeologists live under Spartan conditions in army camps and travel around in Red Army armored vehicles. It's quite a change from Maya research. But Maya epigraphy remains his first love. Along with his young colleague Galina Yershova, who has just completed a biography of Landa, Knorosov has been examining the enigmatic and difficult texts on Maya funerary ceramics. In this area there are outstanding differences of interpretation with Western Mayanists, including myself, that may or may not be reconciled through better lines of communication. In the meantime, we can only hope that with the demise of the Cold War we may one day greet Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov at the site of those very Maya inscriptions that he has taught us how to read. Ancient Maya rulers would have recognized him as an ah miats, "a wise man, cultured, literate," and have accepted him as one of their own. Reprint permission granted by publisher.