Passage
When the Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov published his landmark paper on Mayan writing in 1952, he was working in near-total isolation from the Western archaeological establishment. Decades earlier, during the chaos of the Second World War, Knorozov had allegedly rescued a single volume containing reproductions of three Mayan codices from the flames of a library. This book became his obsession. While Western scholars like Eric Thompson dogmatically insisted that Mayan glyphs were purely ideographic representations of mystical concepts, Knorozov compared the codices with Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century manuscript, *Relación de las cosas de Yucatán*. He realized that Landa’s "alphabet" was actually a list of phonetic syllables. By matching these syllables to modern Mayan spoken words, Knorozov began to read the ancient texts aloud. It was only after Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s later discovery that the monuments recorded the actual historical biographies of kings—rather than astronomical tables—that Knorozov’s phonetic approach gained widespread acceptance. The Western consensus did not shift overnight, but the path to understanding had been quietly paved in a Leningrad study long before the walls of the Cold War began to crack.
Based on the implicit chronological cues and details in the passage, in what chronological order did these events occur, from earliest to latest?
- 1Diego de Landa compiles the manuscript containing his interpretation of the Mayan alphabet.
- 2Yuri Knorozov salvages a volume containing reproductions of Mayan codices.
- 3Yuri Knorozov determines that the glyphs in the codices represent phonetic syllables rather than pure ideas.
- 4Tatiana Proskouriakoff establishes that Mayan inscriptions record the biographies of historical rulers.