De Landa, who during his posting to Yucatán had overseen the destruction of all the codices from the Maya civilization he could find, reproduced his alphabet in “ Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán” intended to justify his actions once he had been placed on trial when recalled to Spain. In 1947, Knorozov wrote his dissertation on the “ de Landa alphabet“, a record produced by the 16th century Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa in which he claimed to have transliterated the Spanish alphabet into corresponding Maya hieroglyphs, based on input from Maya informants. He displayed a particular interest and aptitude for the study of ancient languages and writing systems, especially hieroglyphs, and he also read in medieval Japanese and Arabic literature. He resumed his research into Egyptology, and also undertook comparative cultural studies in other fields such as Sinology. In the autumn of 1945 after the war, Knorozov returned to Moscow State University to complete his undergraduate courses at the department of Ethnography.
However, there has been evidence that Knorozov hasn’t even been in Berlin according to his military records, which state that his military unit by the tie was located near Moscow. However, Yuri Knorozov later provided a different version of the anecdote, by which there wasn’t any fire at all and the books were already prepared for shipment to Moscow. Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script. Somehow Knorozov managed to retrieve from the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known - the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices. The anecdote tells, when stationed in Berlin, Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze. In their retelling, the details of this episode have acquired a somewhat folkloric quality. It was here, sometime in the aftermath of the Battle of Berlin, that Knorozov is supposed to have by chance retrieved a book which would spark his later interest in and association with deciphering the Maya script.
At the closing stages of the war in May 1945, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. From 1943 to 1945 he served his term in the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in the Red Army as an artillery spotter. The outbreak of World War II hostilities along the Eastern Front in mid-1941 interrupted Knorozov’s university studies. In 1940 at the age of 17, Knorozov left Kharkiv for Moscow where he commenced undergraduate studies in the newly created Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University’s faculty of History. At school, it soon became clear that Yuri was academically bright with an inquisitive temperament he was an accomplished violinist, wrote romantic poetry and could draw with accuracy and attention to detail. Yuri Knorozov was born in a village near Kharkiv in Ukraine, at that time the capital of the newly formed Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, into a family of Russian intellectuals. Yuri Knozorov, Epigraphic Atlas of Petén Phase 1 Youth and Education “There are no indecipherable writings, any writing system produced by man can be read by man.” Knorozov is particularly renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. On November 19, 1922, Soviet linguist epigrapher and ethnographer Yuri Knorozov was born.
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