Question

The following passage is adapted from a Humanities essay on the history of linguistics and Mayan decipherment.

Paragraph 1
Mayan hieroglyphic decipherment was stalled for decades by a persistent scholarly consensus: the glyphs were assumed to be purely ideographic or symbolic, representing abstract concepts rather than spoken sounds. Pioneered by J. Eric S. Thompson, the dominant figure in Mayan studies during the mid-twentieth century, this view relegated the script to a mystical calendar system. Thompson argued that the Maya were a peaceful people obsessed with time, and that their writing did not contain phonetic elements representing a spoken language.

Paragraph 2
This paradigm began to fracture in the 1950s when Yuri Knorozov, a Soviet linguist working in isolation, proposed a phonetic key. Knorozov realized that the Maya script was logosyllabic—combining logograms (word-signs) and phonetic signs representing syllables. By matching the glyphs to colonial-era dictionaries of the spoken Mayan language, Knorozov demonstrated that Mayan scribes wrote words phonetically, combining consonant-vowel symbols. For instance, the word for "turkey" (kutz) was written using two syllables (ku and tzu), with the final vowel dropped in pronunciation.

Paragraph 3
However, Western Mayanists, led by Thompson, fiercely rejected Knorozov’s findings, dismissing them as ideologically motivated Soviet propaganda. This skepticism delayed widespread acceptance of the phonetic approach for nearly two decades. It was not until the 1970s, through the collaborative efforts of scholars like Linda Schele and Peter Mathews, that Knorozov's phonetic methodology was systematically applied to Mayan monuments, triggering a rapid decipherment of historical kings, dynasties, and warfare that shattered Thompson’s vision of a peaceful, timeless civilization.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between Paragraph 2 and Paragraph 3?