Decipherment of Maya script
Desciframiento de la escritura maya
- Date
- 1952-1986 · confidence high
- Place
- Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico (1973 Round Table)
- Credited to
- Yuri Knorozov (1952, phoneticism), Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1960, historical content), Linda Schele, Peter Mathews, David Stuart
- People
- 👤 David Stuart1965–👤 Linda Schele1942–1998👤 Peter Mathews1951–👤 Tatiana Proskouriakoff1909–1985👤 Yuri Knórozov1922–1999
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Knorozov showed that Maya glyphs were syllabic; Proskouriakoff proved that the inscriptions recounted dynastic history; at the 1973 Palenque Round Table the names of kings were read. The Maya went from 'peaceful astronomers' to societies with a written history.
Coordinates of Palenque, the setting of the key 1973 meeting. Knorozov worked in Leningrad and was ignored in the West because of the Cold War.
What it led to
- Political history of the Classic Maya cities
- Cultural vindication of present-day Maya people
- End of Thompson's orthodoxy of ideographic glyphs
Built on
- Dresden Codex eclipse tablec. 1200-1250
- Venus table of the Dresden Codexc. 1200-1250
- Landa's alphabet (16th century)
- Förstemann's work on the calendar
Made possible
- LiDAR and hidden Maya cities beneath the jungle2018
- Mesoamerican epigraphy