![]() ![]() Knorozov and his mother fled with the troops to the Soviet-controlled territory and, finally, he found himself in Moscow, where he managed to continue his study at Moscow State University, specializing in Egyptology. He lived in German-occupied Pivdenne until 1943 when the Soviet troops first retook the town but then had to retreat. In September 1941, the Red Army drafted Knorozov for the construction of military fortifications in the Chernihiv region, though a month later, encircled by the advancing German forces, his detachment dissolved and Yuri made his way home. In the university, Knorozov had a special interest in shamanic practices and was fascinated with the ancient Egyptian language, had excellent grades in Latin, the basics of Marxism-Leninism, and military science. In 1939, he entered the historical faculty of Kharkiv State University and finished two years by the time of the Nazi German invasion in the USSR. And a military-medical commission declared Knorozov unfit for military service, which prevented him from becoming a doctor. In the highly militarized Soviet society of the time, medical faculties and institutes primarily trained military doctors so all the university entrants had to be eligible for military duty. In 1937, Yuri Knorozov finished seven grades of a local school, and in 1939 graduated from a rabfak or “workers’ faculty” after two more years of schooling in preparation for entering the Kharkiv Medical Institute to become a psychiatrist. Later Knorozov sincerely believed in retrospect that the trauma had uncovered his abilities. He himself believed that he was born on 31 August and the other date was a mistake in records.Īt the time, the east-Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, merged into the newly-formed Soviet Union in 1922, the year Knorozov was born.Īt the age of five, playing cricket with his brothers, Knorozov received a severe blow to his head and even temporarily lost his sight. Yuri Knorozov was born on 19 November 1922 to a family of Russian and Armenian heritage in Pivdenne near Kharkiv. ![]() No less fundamental of those was Yuri Knorozov, who became the first linguist to decipher the enigmatic Maya script - the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica - in the early 1950s. ![]() Iconic photo of Yuri Knorozov with his cat Aspid (or Asya for short). The most well-known include Ivan Puluj, who is believed to have discovered X-rays via his cathode lamp, Volodymyr Vernadsky, a prominent geochemist and founder of several geological disciplines, space-rocket inventor Serhiy Korolev, Kyiv-born American aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky, and Ukrainian-born American enabler of the computer revolution Lyubomyr Romankiw. The Ukrainian land gave to the rest of the world many world-renown scientists and pioneers in technology. Soviet propaganda touted his discovery as proof of the superiority of the Marxist-Leninist system - yet up until the 1990s, the same system banned Knorozov from traveling abroad to see the traces of the ancient civilization he helped decipher. ”What is created by one human mind can be unraveled by another,” said the young Ukrainian-born Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov and cracked the Maya code, a task that was considered impossible by the leading scholars of the day. ![]()
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