Civilization / Humanities & Culture

Maya Script Deciphered

From Knorozov's 1952 proof that Maya glyphs spell syllables to the breakthroughs of 1973-1981, a script once thought to hold only calendars and astronomy became readable as the history of kings.

Bishop Landa's 1566 'alphabet' had long led nowhere. In 1952 Yuri Knorozov, working in Leningrad, argued that Landa's signs were syllables and that the script mixes word signs with sounds; the leading Western scholar J. Eric Thompson rejected this for decades. Tatiana Proskouriakoff showed around 1958-60 that dates at Piedras Negras recorded the lives of rulers, the 1973 Palenque conference reconstructed a royal dynasty, and David Stuart found in 1981 that one sound can be written with different signs. Scholars today read more than 90% of the glyphs.