Yuri Knorozov

The breakthrough came from an unlikely source.

Yuri Knorosov was a Soviet epigrapher who had never visited a Maya site.

Working from photographs and from a 16th century manuscript, a partial key to the glyphs written by a Spanish bishop Knorosov proposed in 1952 that Maya writing was phonetic.

He demonstrated that the glyphs could be read as syllables, that they spelled out words in a Maya language, and that the script functioned in ways analogous to other writing systems around the world.

The turning point came from several directions at once.

Yuri Knorozov, a Soviet linguist working in the 1950s, argued that Maya writing was at least partly syllabic in nature, that the signs represented sounds rather than only abstract concepts, and that the language behind the script was an ancestor of modern Mayan languages that were still spoken.

This was controversial at the time and was largely dismissed by Western scholars for political as much as intellectual reasons, but it turned out to be correct.

As researchers began treating the glyphs as a mixed script combining syllabic elements with logographic ones, and as the work of scholars including Linda Schele, David Stuart, and others began revealing that the inscriptions were filled with historical content, the texts on Maya monuments transformed from astronomical abstractions into something entirely more vivid and human.