"His thesis at Moscow State University was called" Mazar Shamun Nabi. Central Asian version of the legend of Samson. the path was closed, because the “his relatives were in the occupied territory during the war”. The gravestone monument to the scientist is located on the edge of the Kovalevsky cemetery in St. Petersburg among the crowd of typical burials, he died on March 30, 1999 at the age of 76, alone in the corridor of one of the city hospitals. For five years his grave was overgrown with grass, only in 2004 a monument was erected"
Original taken from kosarex
V Yuri Knorozov - the fate of a genius
https://philologist.livejournal.com/10122849.html
After his death in 1999, Yuri Knorozov on March 11, 2018 will give another slap in the face to Soviet science - a monument will be opened to him in Mexico. He deciphered the Mayan script in 1951-52. It was a great insult to US scientists. He then deciphered several dozen letters, but it was enough for the process of deciphering the Mayan script to begin and continue. He was then 30 years old. Officially, he became the pride of Soviet science. In reality, he was not taken to graduate school. Rescued world fame. In 1955 he was awarded the title of Doctor of Science. They were not released abroad. He went abroad only in 1956, and even then only to Copenhagen at the insistence of Okladnikov. Okladnikov was strong, but an old man. Therefore, in Latin America Knorozov first visited only in 1989 - he was invited by the President of Guatemala. There were already other times, invitations from Latin American states could no longer be rejected at the level of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Knorozov traveled to Latin America several more times.
If they loved to gossip about Grigory Perelman, as if he did not cut his nails and walked in dirty shirts that he did not change for several months, then they liked to gossip about Yuri Knorozov that he was always drunk and in an insane state. It is clear that from such an attitude towards yourself you will involuntarily drink. But Knorozov lived for 77 years and left behind a number of scientific works.
Probably, many representatives of the KGB were circling around Knorozov, preoccupied with the idea of control over the individual. Knorozov worked without stopping. He set himself many tasks: reading numerous Maya texts, deciphering other writing systems, developing brain-related theories of signaling and fascination, and the main goal of his research was the systemic theory of the collective.. The systemic theory of the collective is a conscious distraction of a brilliant scientist from urgent tasks. But then we were fond of sociology and theories of control over teams at the place of work. If in the West they wanted and still want to control society through parties that separated children from their parents, then we had a clear task - to make the members of production teams to be friends not only at work, but also with families, so that there would be less communication with members of other teams and teams. Entered the carpenter's brigade - communicate only with the carpenters of your brigade. Became a traffic police officer - communicate only with the traffic cops of your unit and no more.
As for Knorozov's theory about the settlement of America through the Kuril ridge, I agree for an elementary reason. The seaside area has always been special - a lot of food in the form of fish and shellfish. The need to sail the sea for the sake of fishing required always to strain the brain when creating swimming facilities. Another thing is that in principle it didn’t matter to those who had swimming facilities whether to sail through the Chukchi Strait, go through the ice or sail through the Aleutian ridge. The population in the zone of abundance of fish successfully multiplied, put pressure on each other and was interested in the development of more northern zones, since there are also fish. Those who lived by hunting and fishing in poorer places could not defeat the seaside population for a very long time and also participate in profitable fishing.
Let's return to Knorozov. His fate is one of the many proofs that geniuses are fundamentally disliked in our country. International recognition infuriates. A genius in our conditions must have vitality, the ability to make connections and literally erase mediocre careerists into powder. But this contradicts the nature of genius - openness to the world, sensitivity to various phenomena in the world and to other people's thoughts, the ability to doubt where others do not doubt. The current collapse is a natural continuation of the dominance of the impudent and incapable of doubt, incapable of appreciating other people's ideas, but stealing them in time, and so on.
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Original taken from v_murza in Man and cat. Monument to Yuri Knorozov
His pupils are fire green
He took over my mind.
I wanted to turn away
But I notice with surprise
That he looked inside himself,
What is in the intentness of mirror eyes,
Opal and vertical,
Reading my own destiny
(Charles Baudelaire)
The Kovalevsky cemetery in St. Petersburg is international, democratic and not prestigious. Being outside the city limits, it occupies 110 hectares of the territory of the neighboring subject of the Federation (Leningrad region). There are Muslim and Jewish plots here, so-called "rootless" burials are also made - not claimed by the relatives of the deceased at public expense (about 150 per month).
The cemetery was opened by decree of the Leningrad City Executive Committee at the end of 1984. The number of interesting monuments on Kovalevsky can be counted on the fingers, by some miracle you sometimes see the inscription "This Cross was erected by Luka Ivanov of the village of Yegli in 1903." However, fate wanted to find here last resort great scientist and one of the most mysterious figures of the scientific world of the 20th century.
The name of Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922 - 1999) is on a par with Jean-Francois Champollion, who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, and his main merit is the decipherment of the Mayan script, the last great decipherment that opened an entire civilization to mankind.
The tombstone of the scientist is located on the edge of the cemetery among a crowd of typical burials, somewhat reminiscent of a communal apartment. I learned about him quite by accident, visiting the graves of my relatives.
Knorozov - linguist, historian, ethnographer, Doctor of History. (1955), laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1977), holder of the Order of the Aztec Eagle of Mexico and the Grand Gold Medal of Guatemala. Circle it scientific interests was very wide - from deciphering ancient writing systems to the settlement of America, archaeoastronomy, shamanism, brain evolution and collective theory. He died on March 30, 1999 at the age of 76. alone in the corridor of one of the city hospitals. For five years, his grave was overgrown with grass, only in 2004, on the initiative of S.M. Mironov, the then Chairman of the Federation Council, a monument was erected here.
The author of the project is Moscow sculptor Nikolai Vybornov. The composition is made in the style of Mayan architecture - a platform with a stela and an altar made of pinkish limestone. 
On the sides of the stele there is an inscription in Mayan hieroglyphs with the dates of birth and death of the scientist. On the reverse of the stele there is a copy of the relief from the most beloved Mayan city of Yuri Knorozov - Palenque.
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On the obverse of the stele (photo in the header of the post) is a bas-relief of Knorozov with his beloved Siamese cat Asya, repeating a photograph that is known all over the world.
MI CORAZÓN SIEMPRE ES MEXICANO
Yu.V.Knorozov, 1995 Before the beginning of III International Conference Mayanists in Chetumal, Mexico ()
The biography of Yuri Knorozov is full of mystical events, ordeals and paradoxes, as, apparently, every genius is supposed to.
Among his childhood drawings, an image of an incomprehensible beast with the name Tankas (which in the Mayan language means Milky Way), snakes with the strange name Polenka. Palenque - the name of the ruins big city Maya in Mexico, home to the most important Mayan artifacts, including the Temple of the Inscriptions (Templo de las Inscripciones).
During the war, it is not clear to Knorozov how the books “Report on Affairs in the Yucatan” by a Franciscan monk of the 16th century, left by the Germans, fall into the hands of the Germans. Diego de Landa and the "Maya Codices" in the Guatemalan publication of the Villacorta brothers. 
According to the official version, he "rescued them from the flames of a burning library in Berlin." But he was not there and met the victory near Moscow as a telephone operator of the regiment of the reserve of the headquarters of the commander in chief. At that time he was not interested in Mayanism, he was fond of the history of the civilizations of the East, linguistics and shamanic practices. His thesis at Moscow State University was called “Mazar Shamun Nabi. Central Asian Version of the Samson Legend. The path to graduate school was closed to him, because "his relatives were in the occupied territory during the war."
In 1945, Knorozov came across an article by the German scientist Paul Schellhas "Deciphering the Mayan letter is an unsolvable problem." He leaves shamanistic practices to answer the challenge of Schellhas: “How is this an unsolvable problem? What is created by one human mind cannot but be unraveled by another.<...>Insoluble problems do not exist and cannot exist in any of the fields of science! He held this position throughout his life.
After the war, with the help of Prof. S.A. Tokarev, he managed to get a job as a junior researcher at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, which is next to the Russian Museum. Thus began the Leningrad, the main period of Knorozov's life. He settled in the museum itself. The floor-to-ceiling room, long as a pencil case, was crammed with books, drawings of Mayan hieroglyphs were hung on the walls. The furniture included a table and a soldier's bunk. 
In the early 50s, Knorozov found the keys to the ancient Maya writing. The first publication on the results of deciphering was published in 1952. The success of the young scientist allowed him to go to work in the Kunstkamera - the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A PhD thesis was to be defended.
But then there were other problems. On the question of the Maya Indians, Marxist scholarship had at its disposal Engels' opinion about the absence of states in pre-Columbian America. According to the same dogma, phonetic writing could only exist when class state formations arose. The claim that the Maya had a phonetic script implied a refutation of Engels' theories. This could lead to accusations of revisionism and arrest.
Yuri Valentinovich went to the defense and did not know how it would all end. The defense took place in Moscow on March 29, 1955, and the very next day it turned into a legend. Knorozov's speech at the academic council, according to the figurative expression of eyewitnesses, lasted exactly three and a half minutes, and the result was the assignment of the title not of a candidate, but of a doctor historical sciences.
In Soviet times, after the Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen in 1956, Knorozov was not allowed to travel abroad for many years. At the same time, he bitterly joked: “Endless commissions were created to take him to Mexico, and all the members of the commissions have already been there.”
Only in 1990, thanks to the invitation of the President of Guatemala, did he manage to spend about two months in this country. Already far from being a young scientist, he was able to climb to the top of the Great Jaguar pyramid in Tikal (which no one believed in) and stood there alone for a long time. As always, he smoked - and was immersed in his images.
Starting in 1995, trips to Mexico followed National Institute History and Anthropology. Knorozov visited all the treasured places - Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan, Chichen Itza, La Venta, Monte Alban, Teotihuacan, Xochicalco. He was happy in Mayan land.
In 1995, at the Mexican Embassy in Moscow, he was awarded the Silver Order of the Aztec Eagle. These orders are awarded by the Mexican government foreign citizens who has exceptional service to Mexico. Having received the award, Knorozov said in Spanish: "Mi corazón siempre es mexicano"("My heart is always Mexican").
Yuri Knorozov spent the last years of his life alone, surrounded by kote, in a small block Khrushchev apartment on the street. Granite. After his death, the Kunstkamera refused to provide the museum premises for farewell, and many people gathered in the cramped hospital morgue. Knorozov really liked the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, but they buried him in a new cemetery, in fact, in a wasteland outside the city limits. In some ways, his funeral was reminiscent of the restless death of Paganini.
decoder of ancient Mayan writing
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R Russian linguist and ethnographer, doctor of historical sciences. State Prize of the USSR (1977). He deciphered the writing of the ancient Maya and the proto-Indian letter, introduced huge contribution in the study of the theory and history of writing, in the theory of deciphering historical writing systems and their ethno-semiotic analysis, in the development of general problems of semiotics and the theory of the collective, in the study of ancient, primarily American civilizations. Founder Russian school Mayanism.
Biography
B Knorozov's paternal grandmother is the first People's Artist of Armenia, who performed under the artistic pseudonym Marie Zabel. Grandfather was Russian. Yuri Valentinovich was born near Kharkov in a family of Russian intellectuals, which he especially emphasized.
IN At school, they tried to expel him for "bad behavior", poor progress in some subjects and, most importantly, for his willful disposition. Yuri's eccentricity annoyed many even then.
IN 17 years old (1940) Knorozov, having left Ukraine, entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of History, where he became interested in the history of ancient civilizations of the East, ethnography and linguistics. Specializing in the department of ethnography, he had a special interest in shamanic practices.
Knorozov did not take direct part in the hostilities on the Soviet-German front. Yuri Valentinovich himself in his autobiography noted that he was recognized as non-military for health reasons and in September 1941 was sent to Chernihiv region Ukraine for the construction of military fortifications. After the retreat of Soviet troops from Ukraine and the establishment of a regime there Nazi occupation Knorozov, in his own words, “lived in the village. Yuzhny of the Kharkov region, spending most of the time wandering around the Kharkov and Poltava regions, hiding from mobilizations and getting food for the old mother. It is reliably known that Knorozov did not participate in the capture of Berlin, but, nevertheless, according to the official (!) version that arose later, it was from Berlin that he brought two extremely important books as a military trophy, allegedly saved by him from the flames of a burning library. IN last years when the Soviet ideological machine was destroyed, Yuri Valentinovich tried to get rid of the "stupid and absurd", as he himself said, legend and present those distant events in a new way - the books were in the boxes of the German library prepared for the evacuation and were taken from there Soviet officers. However, much remains unclear: firstly, how, after all, did these books get to Knorozov? And secondly, why would a communications officer need such publications as the 16th-century Franciscan friar Diego de Landa's "Report on Affairs in the Yucatan" and the "Maya Codes" in the Guatemalan publication of the Villacorta brothers? He did not deal with the Maya Indians then.
ABOUT In the fall of 1945 he returned to the university to the department of ethnography, where he delved into Egyptology and Sinology. He was especially interested in ancient writing systems, in particular oriental hieroglyphics, as well as medieval Japanese and Arabic literature. He took up the problem of deciphering the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Maya on the advice of his supervisor, the famous ethnographer prof. S.A. Tokarev.
P After the war, Knorozov went to work in the Moscow branch of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay; participated in the work of the Khorezm expedition (in Central Asia he studied the problem of interaction between the nomadic world - the "barbarian periphery" - and urban civilization).
ABOUT Once Knorozov caught the eye of an article by the German researcher Paul Schellhas entitled "Deciphering the Mayan letter - an unsolvable problem." This publication abruptly changed his scientific plans. "How is this an insoluble problem? What is created by one human mind cannot but be solved by another!"
B having grown up in a sea of Mayan studies, he faced a sharp deterioration in the attitude towards him from the head of the department, Professor S.P. Tolstov. So much so that he refused even to give Knorozov a formal recommendation for graduate school. Fortunately, here, at the Department of Ethnography, Professor Tokarev worked, who gladly supported the disgraced graduate student.
T Nevertheless, according to Knorozov, the new leader "absolutely did not believe in the success of deciphering the Mayan letter, because, following the Americans, he believed that the letter was not phonetic." Using his influence and connections in the scientific world, Tokarev placed his student as a junior researcher at the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR / RAS (Kunstkamere) - first in the sector of the peoples of America, later as head of the ethnic semiotics group.
P Knorozov settled in the museum itself - in a room as long as a pencil case. The room was filled from floor to ceiling with books, and drawings of Mayan hieroglyphs hung on the walls. Of the furniture - only a desk and a soldier's bunk. They say that even then there was a battery of bottles under the table. The trouble that haunted the scientist all his life ...
P Knorozov published his first article with preliminary results of the deciphering of the Maya hieroglyphics ("Ancient writing of Central America") in 1952 at the age of 30. For the translation of the work of Diego de Landa "Report on Affairs in the Yucatan" and a commentary on it (published in 1955), Knorozov received a doctorate (bypassing the previous one).
IN that morning of March 29, 1955, he went to defend his candidate's thesis and did not know how it would all end, even allowing him to be accused of revisionism of Marxism and arrested. The fact is that F. Engels argued that there were no states in pre-Columbian America.
WITH according to the same dogma, phonetic writing could only exist with the emergence of class state formations. The statement that the Mayan Indians had phonetic writing automatically refuted two positions of the "founder" at once. The defense took place in Moscow and the very next day it turned into a legend. The speech of 33-year-old Yuri Knorozov at the academic council lasted exactly three and a half minutes, and the result was the awarding of the title not of a candidate, but of a doctor of historical sciences, which practically does not happen in the humanities.
WITH From that moment on, the history of deciphering ancient writing systems began to fit between two names: Champollion (the famous French Egyptologist who developed the basic principles for deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing) and Knorozov.
IN In 1956, in the wake of international recognition, the researcher was "released" to the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen. From then until 1990, he did not go anywhere, not even suspecting the numerous invitations that came to his name. At the same time, Yuri Valentinovich bitterly joked about "endless commissions to take him to Mexico, all of whose members have already been there." For some time, foreign scientists were perplexed about the colleague's refusal to contact, but, quickly understanding the intricacies of Soviet morals, they themselves reached out to Leningrad. With particular pride, Knorozov told how, at the height of the Cold War, the American school recognized the decryption principle he proposed. But he did not suspect what a storm of hatred his success with the head of American school Mayanist Eric Thompson! AND " cold war"it had absolutely nothing to do with it. Thompson, having learned about the results of the work of a young Soviet scientist, immediately realized "who had the victory", and the thought of this turned out to be unbearable for him. In his message to the Mayanist Michael Ko, full of evil sarcasm, he called his American colleagues "witches riding wild notes in the midnight sky on Yuri's orders" and convinced that Knorozov's decryption was untenable. Thompson ended his message with the following words: "Okay, Mike, you will live to see the year 2000. Attach this message to the Introduction to Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing and judge later if I was right..." Michael Koh saved the letter and on the first day of 2000, rereading it, declared: "Thompson was wrong. Knorozov turned out to be right, and now all of us who study the Maya are Knorozovists."
IN early 60s, Knorozov was offered to participate in the compilation of the first computer program for Maya word processing. A strange group of programmers from Novosibirsk gathered. Having taken all the materials of Knorozov, they tried to create some kind of, as they would now call it, a database of signs of manuscripts. At the same time, they constantly hinted at their cooperation with the military departments and stated that they were engaged in "decryption theory." After some time, "computer scientists" announced that they had developed a theory of machine decryption, and published Knorozov's data in 4 volumes under their own names. The edition was signed in the Mayan language and presented to Khrushchev. From the point of view of experts, the announced "machine decryption" was complete nonsense and made no impression on the experts. Moreover, in 1963, Knorozov's excellent monograph "Writing of the Mayan Indians" was published. However, this absurd misunderstanding cast doubt on the true results of the decryption for an uninformed public. Only after the publication in 1975 of the translation of Mayan manuscripts did recognition come: Knorozov was awarded the State Prize of the USSR.
IN The great codebreaker managed to visit the Mayan country only in 1990, when he was invited by the country's president, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo. The invitation coincided with the unfreezing of diplomatic relations with Guatemala. Knorozov arranged a visit to the main attractions of the country, was awarded the Big gold medal President of Guatemala. Climbing alone to the Tikal pyramid, he stood there silently for a long time... There were some usual surprises for him: the terrorists, having set up defiant surveillance of our car, promised to blow up the delegation. Yuri Valentinovich was pleased. Fate gave him, almost at the end of his life, an amazing opportunity to live in a tropical jungle near the Caribbean Sea, next to his beloved Maya Indians. The students worked on preparing his monograph for publication, and Knorozov enjoyed tropical nature, national Mexican cuisine, and watched unseen stars in the evenings. Sitting next to the President of Mexico at Pavarotti's concert in Chichen Itza, he said with a smile that the great singer was significantly inferior to the Yucatan choir that performed the Cantata of Kukulkan. His words "The Italian has the technique, and the Yucatans have the soul" were repeated by many in Mexico...
Mayan script deciphering
WITH the appearance of Knorozov's articles in the 1950s. a new stage began in the study of Maya writing, and with the publication in 1963 and 1975 of his two works - Maya Writing and Mayan Hieroglyphic Manuscripts, the most outstanding event in Mayan studies of the 20th century, - the second "written" era of the Maya. Hieroglyphic writing - one of the most distinctive features of the Maya culture (the only completely written civilization in Mesoamerica) - was completely forgotten after the conquest of the Mayan states by the Spaniards, the extermination of the priesthood and the destruction of books. Data on the Maya letter - a list of Maya syllabic characters - was available only in the work of D. de Landa. Knorozov, having studied the Maya language using dictionaries and grammars of the 16th-18th centuries, turned to the Landa alphabet and the works of L. de Roni, a follower of J.F. Champollion and proved (contrary to the belief that dominated Western science in 1910-60) the authenticity of Landa's list of Mayan hieroglyphs. Knorozov defined Mayan writing as hieroglyphic, that is, morphemic-syllabic, like Sumerian, ancient Egyptian or Minoan, and applied the same deciphering rules to it as for other hieroglyphic systems.
IN labor of 1963, according to the general recognition of domestic linguists and comparativists, Knorozov deepened modern methodology deciphering, which involves a certain standard procedure - the positional statistics of the sign, which helps to establish and study the patterns of the use of signs in a letter and correlate them with the patterns of the language in which the texts are written (the main methodological setting of Knorozov), as well as conduct cross-readings (according to Knorozov, the main criterion correct decryption). Knorozov organically combined this structural-distributive analysis with purely linguistic techniques and methods, "combinatorial" and etymological approaches to the study of ancient texts. He showed that without deep knowledge of philology and the history of culture, deciphering in the broadest sense is generally impossible. Knorozov revealed the very mechanism for creating hieroglyphics. He outlined the main provisions related to the deciphering process, published a catalog of graphemes, substantiated the phonetic reading of the main signs of Maya writing, the rules of spelling and calligraphy, the order of phonetic transitions, and examined the writing system in detail.
D the encryption made it possible to start serious philological and semiotic studies of the language and culture of the ancient Maya, to compile a morphemic and etymological dictionary ancient language, translation of sources. In 1960-80 Knorozov introduced scientific turnover the most important written sources containing the richest material on Maya culture: they deciphered and translated not only hieroglyphic manuscripts of the 12th-14th centuries. (a kind of encyclopedia covering all aspects of the life of the ancient Maya), but also many dozens of inscriptions on monuments, memorial vessels, figurines and other small plastic items, historical chronicles, mythological, prophetic and ritual texts of the 16-18 centuries. from the so-called "Books of Chilam Balam". Translations of manuscripts and inscriptions on vessels and monuments are provided with detailed ethnolinguistic comments. Also published are works on the history of Mesoamerican civilizations and the history of Yucatan in the 10th-16th centuries, as well as translations of several songs of the 17th-18th centuries. from the collection "Chants from Ts"itbalche" (together with G. G. Ershova).
ABOUT Knorozov paid special attention to religion, mythology and rituals. In works devoted to the deciphering and study of the semantics of the names of the gods, their iconography and functions, the reconstruction of the structure of the pantheon, calendar rituals and cosmographic representations of the ancient Maya, the ritual and images of deities were turned by Knorozov into a tool for studying religion, economic, political and historical traditions of the Maya. Exploring changes in religious beliefs, which led to the emergence of city-states, the stages of the addition of iconographic groups, the formation of the Mayan pantheon and the addition of ideas about the supreme deity, Knorozov showed how religious concepts were created and used along the way political struggle for power (for example, the institution of alternate rule of the four gods is considered by him as a reflection of the institution of change in power of the leaders of four phratries that really existed at the stage of formation of states: the ritual of transferring power, the names and titles of the group of gods-stewards identified for the first time by Knorozov, who monitored the change of power among the gods, serve for the scientist as a key to the reconstruction of the power structure in the early Mayan states).
IN 1973-95 Knorozov worked on the translation and interpretation of inscriptions and scenes on funeral ceramics and monumental monuments. The translation of dozens of dynastic, victorious, ritual, mythological, commemorative, prophetic, calendar and astronomical texts on vessels, figurines and monuments (including on the lid of the sarcophagus in Palenque) provided unique information about such aspects of the Maya culture, which were completely unknown before. were known. Knorozov's translation of ring inscriptions on vessels - a standard hymn in honor of the deceased, called by Knorozov the "formula of rebirth", answered the question about the purpose of ceremonial ceramics: vessels and figurines were an attribute of the funeral ritual.
B Thanks to the translations, unique information was obtained about the structure of the underground pantheon, the titles and functions of its gods, ideas about souls, rites of divination under the influence of drugs, rituals for sending messengers to the gods (human sacrifices), initiation rites, funeral feasts, New Year's ceremonies, the first information about temple land tenure Maya, about the structure of power, priestly and military organization, the names and titles of rulers and military leaders.
IN short articles on the Mesoamerican calendar, which played a huge role in the creation and existence of all civilizations in the region, Knorozov gave a broad panorama of the history of calendar reforms in Mesoamerica; for the first time he turned the calendar ritual into a source for the reconstruction of the power structure and the history of the struggle for power in the early states.
P.S. Later, explaining his success in deciphering, Yu. Knorozov very seriously said: “When I was no more than five years old, the brothers hit me on the forehead with a croquet ball ... My eyesight was restored, albeit with difficulty. Apparently, this was a kind of " sorcery trauma. "I can give a recommendation: to hit future codebreakers in the head, but it's not clear how. You can take a control group for the experiment - and if someone gives up, that's what it should be!", Finishing the story, he smiled.
On the problems of Mesoamerican civilizations
TO Norozov put forward fundamentally new ideas regarding the key problems of Mesoamerican history. In works on the genesis of writing and calendar, ethnogenetic processes in ancient America, the Mayan ethnogenesis, the problems of the formation and history of Mesoamerican civilizations spoke on one of the most controversial issues in Mesoamerican studies - Olmec. He proved (based on a serious documentary base) the genetic relationship of the Olmecs and the Maya; The Olmec states were considered the main source of cultural borrowings for the Maya. He considered the Olmec civilization the creator of the main cultural conquests of Mesoamerica, the main cultural models followed by the later civilizations of the region: the agricultural calendar and related rituals, cyclic chronology associated with the change of government in cities, chronology and historical tradition, iconographic canon, pantheon structure, hieroglyphic writing (it was borrowed by the Maya as a sacred letter of literature and cult).
IN All works of Knorozov are distinguished not only by a deep knowledge of diverse sources, the involvement of the entire set of data on the Mayan culture and other cultures ancient world, but also a synthetic understanding of data from different disciplines about the genesis of art and religion, the origin and division of languages, the settlement of America, the emergence of ancient civilizations, the evolution of writing and calendar, calendar rituals and religion. His works are a significant contribution to the study of rituals, cult and mythology, socio-political institutions, military organization, economy and life of the population of the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica.
Application of Knorozov decryption methods
for other writing systems
P Later, the method of deciphering and semiotic analysis of Knorozov's graphic systems was applied with great success by the scientist and his followers in the works of the 1950-80s. over the decipherment of the texts of Easter Island (1956 - the definition of kohau rongo rongo as hieroglyphic writing and the creation of the foundations for its decipherment; Knorozov's ideas and decoding - in the works of I.K. Fedorova 1963, 1986, etc.) and proto-Indian writing.
WITH The system of deciphering and semiotic analysis of ancient graphic systems, developed by Knorozov, is an important methodological key for reading and interpreting inscriptions and iconographic monuments not only of the Maya, but of any traditional culture. In the last twenty years, many works based on the Knorozov method have appeared.
W and his contribution to the development of science Yu.Knorozov was awarded highest order Mexican Republic.
P.S. Scientific legacy of Yu.V. Knorozov is carefully kept in Moscow. In the capital Russian State Humanitarian University with the help of the Mexican embassy, during the life of the great scientist, the Center for Mesoamerican Studies was created, which now bears his name.
Interview of D. Belyaev to radio "Echo of Moscow" - "The riddle of Mayan hieroglyphs":
Program "Observer", TV channel "Culture". Aired on 11/29/2017.
Subject: Yuri Knorozov, decoder of the Mayan script. The guests of the studio discuss and talk about the life of the Soviet scientist Yu.V. Knorozov
The national hero of the Mexicans and Guatemalans in his own homeland and during his lifetime did not win such love. Despite the fact that the school he created is the only one in the humanities, recognized throughout the world, and concerns the global cultural heritage. He died forgotten by everyone in the corridor of one of the St. Petersburg hospitals. And the mysteries of the Mayan civilization, on which Knorozov revealed the secret, still excite contemporaries and give rise to many myths, such as predictions about the end of the world.
ABOUT Yuri Knorozov recalls his student, director of the Mesoamerican Center. Yu. V. Knorozova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of the Russian State Humanitarian University, member of the Council for Science and Education under the President of the Russian Federation Galina Ershova.
Talent Family
- Knorozov was born in 1922 near Kharkov in a family of intellectuals, the last of five children. His father is an engineer, worked in senior positions in St. Petersburg. In World War I, he was wounded, and he was demobilized, sent with his family to the south, to build southern railways. There, Knorozov's father was the 1st secretary of the party, that is, in the present - the mayor. Parents raised their children psychological school Bekhterev. At the beginning of the century it was very popular and powerful pedagogical system. According to her, the child in his development repeats the evolution of man, and it is necessary to engage in his upbringing from infancy. Great importance given aesthetic education. In particular, children's drawings were analyzed to find out the abilities of a small child. As a result, in the Knorozov family, all five children took up science. Two became laureates of the State Prize, two - doctors of science. Only sister Knorozova Galina I was able to defend only my Ph.D. thesis - because of the ban on entering graduate school. Meanwhile, she, working at the Institute of Endocrinology, developed drugs for cancer. This is such a very special environment that the Knorozovs created for their children.
After graduating from the 7th grade of the railway school in the village of Yuzhny, Yuri Knorozov finished his studies at the medical school. He was very interested in the problems of the brain - how communication occurs, how a person speaks, etc. At that time, few people were interested in these topics. But for some reason he entered the Faculty of History at Kharkov State University. I managed to unlearn two years, and the war began. Since he had some kind of illness, he was declared unfit for service long before the war. By the way, all the other men in the family were officers of high ranks, and Knorozov considered himself a kind of outcast in this sense. So they didn’t take Yuri Valentinovich to the front, they sent him to dig trenches. The Germans almost instantly occupied the territory (Kharkov was taken already at the end of October 1941). Under the bombing, he reached his mother's house. The Germans drove them out of the house, together with his sister and mother he lived in the basement. When in February 1943 our troops liberated Kharkov for the first time for several days, the Knorozovs went beyond the front line and went to look for their father. At the beginning of the war, he led the evacuation. But very quickly, in the military turmoil, communication with him was interrupted. Finally, the father was found in Moscow. By this time, Knorozov had already been ill with typhus. For health reasons, he was still not taken to the front, although it was already 1943, when they took away almost everyone capable of holding a weapon.
Shamanic inclinations
In Moscow, Knorozov tried to continue his studies at the history department at Moscow State University, he was refused. My father had to intervene, use the administrative resource. Knorozov was accepted, as usual with the loss of a year, that is, back to the 2nd course. During his studies, he again took up issues of brain activity. And most of all he was interested then in shamanism. The diploma and the first publication were devoted specifically to the shamanic cult.
By the way, he himself possessed certain hypnotic abilities. So he wanted to understand this phenomenon. A common practice for researchers is to study what you want to understand about yourself. He didn't test it on me, he never even talked about it. Therefore, it was a complete surprise for me when I learned from relatives about his “psychotherapeutic practices”. As a teenager, even in the village of Yuzhny near Kharkov, he relieved a headache by the laying on of hands, and alleviated suffering from other misfortunes. Patients came to him from all around. And when he lived in Moscow, with his brother, in the famous House on the embankment opposite the White House, he tested his strength on his little niece. He told her through the wall that white monkeys were climbing from the balcony. The baby woke up screaming. Then her parents guessed whose things they were, and the experiments stopped. And she still remembers those white monkeys.
However, Maya Knorozov was more interested than shamans. I don’t know for sure at what stage they hooked him, but definitely during his student years at Moscow State University. It was then that he transferred the work Second Bishop of Yucatan (Mexico State) Diego de Landa"Report on Affairs in the Yucatan", which told about the Maya civilization, including the Mayan alphabet. True, the signs of the letter turned out to be encrypted so cunningly that only Knorozov managed to unravel their meaning. And this became the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
From disgrace to glory
The method of deciphering ancient writing systems created by Knorozov is called “positional statistics”. The point is the following. To read the text, you must first understand what type of letter it belongs to. Let's say in Chinese one character represents a whole word. In English, Russian and others European languages, a sign, or letter, denotes a sound. And sometimes there is a syllabary, as in India, where each sign conveys one syllable. Each type of writing has its own number of characters. The alphabet has about 30 characters. To read Chinese, you need to know at least 5,000 characters, and the best dictionaries include up to 50,000 characters. There are about 300 characters in a syllabary. The only condition: to determine the type of letter, the text must be uniform and fairly large - at least 5 thousand characters. Fortunately, the Maya have preserved such.
Having counted all the possible signs encountered (there were 355 of them), Knorozov found out that the Maya used a syllabary. Then followed an analysis of how often individual signs occur. It is known that the most used are auxiliary words: prepositions, conjunctions, particles, etc. Having made all these meticulous calculations, Knorozov was able to read the Mayan tests using the “de Landa alphabet”. Why couldn't anyone do this before Knorozov? Just because it never occurred to anyone: the signs in this alphabet denoted syllables, not letters, as many thought. The Indians wrote down their signs in accordance not with the pronunciation of the Spanish letters, but with their name. And this has completely confused many researchers. Then, according to the method of Knorozov, they began to decipher the proto-Indian script, Mongolian, the texts of Easter Island - all these scientific groups worked under his leadership.
When Knorozov graduated from the university, the question arose about entering graduate school in order to continue scientific work. It was then that he was reminded that during the war of 1941-1945 he was in the territory occupied by the Germans. IN Soviet time this item was always present in the questionnaire. Postgraduate studies at both Moscow State University and the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences turned out to be closed to him. Although, we note, the director of the institute S.P. Tolstov and Knorozov's supervisor at Moscow State University S. A. Tokarev personally petitioned for this. But it's all to no avail. Therefore, Knorozov was transferred to Leningrad, enrolled as an employee of the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. The director of the museum was a very nice character Efim Abramovich Milshtein. The feeling that he cleaned up all the "singed". In the next room-pencil case at the museum he lived with Knorozov Lev Gumilyov, came Akhmatova. So Knorozov was aware of all family affairs. So with Gumilyov, Knorozov discussed the problems of society, according to what laws it develops. Until Gumilyov was arrested. After that, Knorozov prudently kept silent about the theory of the collective, deciding not to risk it, and began to study only Maya.
However, without graduate school, how can one break the path to big science? Write and defend a dissertation. And this part of Knorozov's biography is overgrown with legends. Allegedly barely starting a report for the competition degree Candidate of Sciences, after 3.5 minutes he received the title of Doctor of Historical Sciences. In reality, such a scenario was carefully orchestrated by Knorozov's supervisors, who understood that only such a move would allow him to get out of disgrace. And the calculation turned out to be correct. After being awarded the title of candidate of sciences, he received a doctorate by the second vote. However, Knorozov managed to throw out a trick here too. When the commission suggested that he begin to present the work, he boldly replied in the spirit of saying that anyone who is interested has already read everything, why waste more time. The mentors were ready to kill the eccentric student. But it worked out. All this is set out in archival documents - protection protocols, which were discovered not so long ago by head of our interdisciplinary program Evgenia Andreevna Dolgova. So what is it true fact. From that moment on, Knorozov began to be promoted as a young talent. He was a very handy hero for that. The country left 10 years ago terrible war, drained of blood, and at the same time it has such geniuses who make great discoveries. True, such increased attention only annoyed Knorozov, he did not like to waste time on trifles.
Y. Knorozov with a Siamese cat Asya (Aspid) in 1971. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
Asya cat as a co-author
Having made his brilliant discovery, Knorozov tried to return to the theory of the collective. He wrote a thesis, but absolutely ingenious article "On questions about the classification of signaling." True, at that time no one appreciated her merit. It was published in the journal "African Studies" - obviously someone attached it out of friendship. Meanwhile, Knorozov then clearly defined how the human brain works and the communication system is formed - the “send” signal, the “receive” signal, why these signals are generated (to achieve a common goal), how a person becomes a person, etc. In general, he dreamed of doing exactly this topic. And prompted him to this theory of signaling ... the cat Asya. She gave birth to a kitten, who was named Fat Kitty. Knorozov watched Asya teach him to hunt, analyzed the signals that the cat “talked” to the kitten. And at that moment an idea was born. Since then, he tried to write Asya as a co-author of the article. This is in Soviet times! Moreover, wherever an official photograph was required, he gave a photo of his portrait in a suit with a tie and Asya in his arms. The cat, of course, was always cut off. And every time he got angry about it. By the way, the monument in Mexico is made in the form of a stele, on which a relief depicting Knorozov with a cat in his arms is engraved.
mexican sun
For some reason, what most non-specialists admire about Knorozov is that he was able to decipher the Mayan script without going to Mexico, to the habitats of the Mayan civilization. There is nothing surprising here. Manuscript deciphering is a desk job. Moreover, the texts themselves were available in the Lenin Library. Nevertheless, he really wanted to visit the Yucatan. The dream came true almost at the end of his life, in 1990. My husband helped. As a Guatemalan, he was well acquainted with the wife of the President of Guatemala. Knorozov was sent an official invitation from the President of the Republic. The Academy of Sciences immediately replied in the spirit that Knorozov, they say, cannot go, he is very busy, but there are many worthy people who are ready ... When I finally told Knorozov: “Yuri Valentinovich, we’ll go to Guatemala after all!” , he replied sarcastically, “Yes, I know how many commissions there are already to send me abroad. At the same time, all members of the commission have been there.” And in fact it was. However, the wife of the President of Guatemala intervened again. She personally called Knorozov, made sure of his consent and informed the bureaucrats from the Academy of Sciences about this. Yuri Valentinovich immediately fell in love with Guatemala. In fact, he was the first time abroad (after the congress in Copenhagen in 1956 he was not allowed to go abroad), everything was a wonder for him: why there are no queues in stores, why everything is there ... In Russia, this the shops were already empty. It was impossible to buy even the most elementary. In Leningrad, Knorozov collected gobies from the dumps - the smoker was terrible. And in Guatemala, everyone around him walks, loves him, and even at the presidential level. Even strange threats to kill us did not spoil his mood. No sooner had we arrived in Guatemala than telephone calls began demanding to leave national territory within 48 hours or we'll have a bomb in our room. We didn't even notice that we were being followed. The husband negotiated with the threats. And Knorozov was just amused. He went out on the balcony to smoke with the words: “Well, did they come to kill us or not?” Kaif caught from everything after the Leningrad rain, dullness, poverty. We left, the Guatemalans felt ashamed, and they invited us to visit the archaeological sites again. When Knorozov went to Mexico or Guatemala, he seemed to come to life, he felt like a man. At home, the attitude was different. Knorozov died in 1999 in a hospital from a stroke, forgotten by everyone. Even relatives were not around. When the staff of our center found out about his death, everyone went to St. Petersburg. The Mexican embassy gave $500 for the funeral. And after his death, the great scientist was not immediately remembered. It took a decade for it to be mentioned on television and in newspapers without the derogatory characterization of "Neformat".
Myths and truth
Although Yu. Knorozov deciphered the letter of the Maya back in the 50s of the last century, strange myths about them are still being born and live. One of the most popular is the myth of the end of the world, which the Mayans allegedly predicted in their calendar. Recently, such predictions have been voiced with enviable regularity on the eve of each round date. There is nothing like this in the Mayan calendar. A round date is simply a type of entry for the Sun's transition to another constellation. It has long been known that the Sun moves across the celestial sphere in the zodiac circle, every month passing one of the 12 constellations - the signs of the zodiac and returns to the starting point from where the path began. However, to complete the circle, due to small shifts in motion, the Sun each time lacks a year, and a year later it is slightly behind the starting point - the vernal equinox is taken for it. Even ancient astronomers calculated that after about 2000 years, the Sun “lags behind” by one constellation and crosses the equator at the vernal equinox, being already in another (previous) sign of the zodiac. So the Maya simply recorded this transition to another constellation with a beautiful date of 130,000, as astronomers love.
Another myth is the customs of brutal sacrifices. In fact, there were no special horrors and atrocities. The Maya in this sense were no different from other civilizations. Yes, human sacrifices were practiced at the dawn of development. But it was, if I may say so, an incredible "exclusive" when a particularly dramatic moment in life came - a severe drought, an attack by enemies, etc. Further, all cultures (and the Maya is no exception) begin to replace human sacrifices with symbols. For example, animals. Then completely inanimate symbols. They could crush an ear, a male organ, so that blood dripped onto the resin, burned, smoked. Blood is the soul, when it goes into the sky, it means it is released. This is the essence of any sacrifice. When the northern barbarians invaded the territory of the Maya, it was precisely because of their wild customs that they copied the custom without understanding the essence, and could sacrifice people, and even massively.
By the way, the study of the Mayan civilization, the foundations of its existence and the causes of death is part of Knorozov's theoretical research. All civilizations perish on one thing - the loss of cultural tradition. When a civilization reaches its peak and stops developing (and development is the key to the stability of a closed system), it inevitably begins to die. So did the Maya - they reached their peak (in fact, they were smarter than everyone there), "slowed down" in development, and then the climate overlays, the barbarians invaded ... They even social organization violated. After all, Maya leaders inherited titles by blood. The barbarians realized that it was necessary first of all to exterminate the leaders, the top, and the system fell apart. The Maya settled in the territory of Mexico and Guatemala, having lost the calendar, the letter. Cities are gone. The Maya retreated to a lower civilizational level, to a simple agriculture, hunting. After the social catastrophe of the 10th century, a revival begins in the 12th century. They took up their minds, it seemed to go ... and again the universal model was repeated, as in the whole world. The Spaniards arrived. A civilization without its territory cannot exist. This is a very important point for the protection of any social space. This is our food, energy. What is happening with Russia now? Nobody cares about the Russians. But we still have one sixth of the land with the richest energy resources, which they are trying to seize with all their might. There is a battle for this. So it was with the Maya: when they lost their own territory, which they could dispose of, on which they could build their policy, do what they need, this was the beginning of the end.
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (November 19, 1922, Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR - March 30, 1999, St. Petersburg) - Soviet historian and an ethnographer, a specialist in epigraphy and ethnography; founder of the Soviet school of Mayan studies. Doctor of Historical Sciences (1955). Laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1977). Cavalier of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (Mexico) and the Grand Gold Medal (Guatemala).
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was born in the village of Yuzhny (now Pivdenny) near Kharkov, then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, in the family of the chief engineer of the Southern Building Materials Trust. Brothers: Sergey is a surveyor engineer, Boris is an adjunct of the F.E. Dzerzhinsky Military Academy, Leonid is a military doctor of the 3rd rank of the Special Far Eastern Red Banner Army, sister Galina is a researcher at the All-Ukrainian Endocrinological Institute. The paternal grandmother was a well-known theater actress, the first People's Artist of Armenia Mariam Davidovna Sakhavyan / Knorozova (pseudonym Marie Zabel, 1858, Bitlis, Western Armenia - January 12, 1926, Tiflis).
According to Yuri Valentinovich himself, his date of birth was August 31, according to his passport - November 19. At school, he was a bright, but too uncontrollable student. Despite his eccentric behavior, the future scientist distinguished himself in the study of both natural and human sciences, and was also interested in different types Arts: played the violin, wrote poetry and showed the ability to draw with almost photographic accuracy. In 1937 he graduated from the 7th grade of the railway school No. 46 in the village of Yuzhny. In 1939 he graduated from the workers' faculty at 2 KhMI. I managed to study in the first year of the Faculty of History of Kharkiv State University. A. M. Gorky.
In 1940, at the age of 17, Knorozov entered the Moscow State University to the Faculty of History, where he initially specialized in Egyptology. At the university, Knorozov was able to realize his passion for history ancient east, ethnography and linguistics. However, his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war, Knorozov was drafted into the army and in the fall of 1941 he was surrounded, his relatives remained in the occupied territory. It is not known how he got to Moscow. In 1943, Yuri Valentinovich was called up for the second time and left for the front.
Knorozov fought in communications units and (according to the entry in the military ID) met the victory near Moscow as a telephonist of the 158th artillery regiment of the commander's headquarters reserve. It is known that Knorozov did not participate in the capture of Berlin, but, nevertheless, according to a legend that arose later, it was from Berlin that he brought two extremely important books as a military trophy, allegedly saved from the flames of a burning library. At the same time, it is not clear why the communications officer needed such publications as Diego de Landa's "Report on Affairs in the Yucatan" in the publication of Brasseur de Bourboura and the "Maya Codes" in the Guatemalan publication of the Villacorta brothers, since he did not deal with the Maya Indians then. In the army, Knorozov stubbornly refused to go to officer courses in order to quickly demobilize and return to scientific work.
In 1945, Knorozov returned to the university at the department of ethnography to continue his research in the field of shamanistic practices. Working in the Moscow branch of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Knorozov spent several months in the Uzbek and Turkmen SSR, participating in the work of the Khorezm expedition. Working in Central Asia, he studied the specifics of the relationship between nomadic ethnic groups and settled civilizations in the region from ancient times to the period of expansion. Russian Empire. And at that time, Knorozov came across an article published in 1945 by the German researcher Paul Schellhas entitled "Deciphering the Mayan letter is an unsolvable problem." This publication dramatically changed his scientific plans. He leaves shamanistic practices to answer the challenge of Schellhas: “How is this an unsolvable problem? What is created by one human mind cannot but be unraveled by another.” He held this position all his life. After graduating from the university, Knorozov was informed that he could not apply for postgraduate studies, since his relatives ended up in the occupied territory. Thanks to S. A. Tokarev, he moved to Leningrad and became an employee of the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, where he was engaged, in his own words, “rough museum work without pretensions”, and he lived in a room in the building of the museum itself. In parallel, work was underway to decipher the Mayan script. After a breakthrough in 1952, S. A. Tokarev and S. P. Tolstov secured his transfer to the N. N. Miklukho-Maclay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera) in Leningrad, where he worked until his death.
Knorozov managed to visit the Mayan country only in 1990, when he was invited by the President of Guatemala, Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo. The invitation coincided with a period of active efforts to unfreeze diplomatic relations between the USSR and this Central American country. The Government of Guatemala arranged for Knorozov to visit all the brightest sights of the country and noted the merits of the great scientist by awarding him the Big Gold Medal of the President of Guatemala.
In 1995, at the Mexican Embassy in Moscow, Knorozov was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, which is awarded by the Mexican government to foreign citizens for exceptional services to Mexico. Until 1998, he managed to visit Mexico once more and the only time he visited the United States, where he tested the last of his hypotheses about the origin of the Mesoamericans in the field.
In 1999, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov died of a stroke and subsequent pulmonary edema in a hospital bed in St. Petersburg exposed to the corridor, all alone, shortly after receiving honorary award them. Tatyana Proskuryakova (USA).
He was buried at the Kovalevsky cemetery near St. Petersburg.
Doctor of Historical Sciences Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (1922-1999) is known for his deciphering of the Mayan script, using mathematical methods for studying unsolved scripts. Like many other representatives of Soviet science, Yuri Knorozov made a rapid ascent to the pillars of knowledge when, after thirty years, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic of deciphering the Mayan script.
The Mayan language was considered lost, and today only three copies of the texts have been preserved, which Yuri Knorozov deciphered without leaving his office. A complete translation of the Mayan hieroglyphic manuscripts was published in 1975. For this work, Yu. V. Knorozov was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1977. During this period, he was deciphering the proto-Indian script, and considered the possibilities of deciphering the Easter Island script.
These works were not completed properly, since there were other areas of research into proto-Indian and Tibetan writing, which were conducted by Doctor of Sciences Yuri Nikolayevich Roerich. Having collected a huge amount of material on expeditions to Tibet and India with his father, the artist Nicholas Roerich, the “Tibetologist” Yuri Roerich gave an interpretation of the decoding of Indian and Tibetan writing based on the local religious teaching, Buddhism.
Before Yu. Knorozov, the American scientist Eric Thompson, who rejected the idea that Mayan hieroglyphs are letters or words, was considered the main expert in the world in deciphering the Mayan script. He considered them symbols, pictures that express ideas that cannot be spoken, not sounds. But how can one guess what symbolic meaning the Indians put into each of their drawings?
Thompson's symbolic theory made deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs an almost impossible task. A fierce controversy erupted between the two scientists on the pages scientific journals. But the theory of the Russian scientist gave a way to read any Mayan texts. The researcher of Indian cities T. Proskuryakova, using the Knorozov method, read the hieroglyphs found on a stone wall in ancient city Palenque. The hieroglyphs turned out to be the biographies of the Mayan rulers.
The history of the discovery of America during the time of the conquistadors who "carried the cross and the sword" is tragic and has been studied for a long time based on the materials of Joan Barros, Fernand Mendes Pinto, Pigafetta. The author of the "History of the Indies" Bishop Las Casas and his colleague Diego de Landa, Bishop of Yucatan, the author of the handwritten book "Report on Affairs in Yucatan", which contains a lot of valuable information about the Maya civilization. Landa, according to many scholars, burned all the Maya handwritten books.
Thompson, who did not agree with Knorozov's theory, wrote an angry letter to his colleagues in which he predicted that by 2000 his theory of the symbolic interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphs would win phonetic theory Knorozov. The arbitrators of this scientific dispute, apparently, will have to be all of us who are waiting for the approaching "universal end" and those who treat this idea with disdain.
It is still difficult to understand the cosmogony of the Ancient Maya. How, for example, you can be on the platform of the earth, inside the Galaxy, near the Perseus arm, to see the entire Galaxy in geometric configurations, the CROSSROADS OF THE WORLDS. Or the Great Bosom of the Cosmic Mother giving birth to the Creation. Where is the gap of XIBALBA, is the black road from the underworld, where death passes into the stage of life, there comes the REVIVAL of the World or the Soul IN A NEW QUALITY, in a more perfect, renewed, beautiful.
Having returned from the concept of knowledge about the Mayan Indians to the real world, I will turn to the personality of the creator of the theory of phonetic interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphs, Yuri Knorozov. In the photo with a Siamese cat in his arms, he has the appearance of a gloomy medieval gloomy alchemist who has gone into himself. The students presented him as an uncommunicative person with the ability to draw, he played the violin, wrote poetry. And his home was a small room in the famous St. Petersburg museum - the Kunstkamera.
Since 1945, Knorozov at the University at the Department of Ethnography, has been conducting his research in the field of astronomy, shamanism, brain evolution and collective theory. In 1999, the founder of the Mayanist school, holder of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov, died of a stroke and subsequent pulmonary edema in a hospital bed in St. Petersburg exposed to the corridor, all alone.
Like the famous Count Cagliostro, who died after a long loneliness, Yuri Knorozov passed away without a crowd of accompanying followers. The man who studied the practices of shamanism, which you can now meet in the Unicorn and Castaneda schools, has left. According to the recollections of students, he drank heavily and believed that his linguistic abilities were the result of a trauma received in childhood.
How can we now relate to the results of the legacy of Yuri Knorozov translated from the language of the ancient Maya, telling about cosmic cataclysms? I think - calmly and indifferently, as well as to the "Qumran scrolls", "Turin shroud" and other artifacts. We know a story that is much ancient history ancient Maya revealed to the world only in the XIX century. And in every cosmogony there is the "magic of numbers" revealed to the world by Pythagoras.
Each newly researched ancient text carries information, primarily of a religious nature, as we see in the deciphered Mayan writings. Therefore, it would be more logical to turn to the already well-known studies of world religions, which, as practice has shown, tell about various events that have their own historical implications. About different natural cycles, repeating in the physical world.
According to the Mayan calendar, on December 12, 2012, some cycle ended, about which we know nothing. In Rus', the Novgorodian Kirik (1136) was engaged in calendar calculations. Later, in the 14th century, surrounded by the Novgorod archbishop Vasily Kaliki. Then calendar calculations were carried out at the end of the 15th century. in Novgorod by Archbishop Gennady and in Moscow by Metropolitan Zosima.
In 1492, on September 1, seven thousand years “from the creation of the world” expired according to the Byzantine chronology. In this regard, the days of the celebration of Easter - the main Christian holiday - were calculated only until 1492. In the Paschals of the XIV - XV centuries. under this - 1492 - the words were often written: “Here is fear! There is sorrow!”. The whole Christian world expected the end of the world. But the aforementioned year has passed, and the Last Judgment has not come. It did not come on December 12, 2012 either.
Another religious source, about which the researcher of India and Tibet, Yuri Roerich, wrote is the "Golden Age", which, according to the teachings of the Brahmins, will come after several "Souths", which in themselves have calculations of tens of thousands of years. The researcher of Tibet G.D. Tsybikov gives us the following information about Shambhala that, according to our calendar, it will come in 2335 AD. The Shambhala War is something similar to the coming of the Jewish Messiah and the second coming of Christ among Christians. And we have to wait, as the researcher says, for another three hundred years.
Let's hope that we will not live to see the "Last Judgments" and all this will happen later someday.
