Question

This passage is adapted from an article discussing the history of linguistic decipherment in Mesoamerica.

For centuries, the hieroglyphic writing carved into the limestone structures of Mesoamerica remained an inscrutable enigma. When the American explorer John Lloyd Stephens and English artist Frederick Catherwood published their illustrated accounts of ruined Maya cities in the early 1840s, they sparked a wave of intellectual curiosity, yet the script itself resisted explanation. Early Western scholars, influenced by prevailing theories of language development, assumed that the intricate glyphs were purely ideographic or pictographic—pictorial representations of ideas or objects rather than components of a phonetic writing system. This misconception was consolidated in the mid-twentieth century by the towering figure of Sir J. Eric S. Thompson, the preeminent Mayanist of his era. Thompson argued dogmatically that the glyphs were symbols of time, astronomy, and religious contemplation, devoid of phonetic syntax. Because of Thompson’s academic authority and his active hostility toward dissenting opinions, his view dominated the field for decades, effectively stalling progress in decipherment.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected quarter: a quiet office in Leningrad, where a Soviet linguist named Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov approached the problem from a distance. Knorozov had never visited Mesoamerica, but he possessed a facsimile of the three surviving Maya codices—the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices—as well as a copy of Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century manuscript, *Relación de las cosas de Yucatán*. Landa, a Spanish bishop infamous for burning countless Maya books in an auto-da-fé in 1562, had ironically recorded what he believed to be a Maya "alphabet." For centuries, scholars had attempted to apply Landa's alphabet directly to the codices to read them phonetically, but because the resulting sequences yielded gibberish, they concluded that Landa's guide was either a colonial fabrication or a collection of random sketches drawn by a confused scribe.

Knorozov’s genius lay in recognizing that the failure of previous scholars stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of Landa's elicitation process. Knorozov realized that when Landa asked his Maya informant for the glyph corresponding to the letter *b*, he was not asking for a single phoneme, which does not exist in isolation in spoken Maya. Instead, Landa pronounced the name of the Spanish letter *b* (which sounds like "beh"). The Maya scribe, attempting to cooperate, drew the glyph that corresponded to the syllable *beh*, which in Maya means "road" or "path." Similarly, when asked for *c* (pronounced "seh"), the scribe drew the glyph for the syllable *ze*. Knorozov hypothesized that the Maya writing system was not alphabetic, but logosyllabic, consisting of both logograms (signs representing whole words) and phonetic syllabic signs (typically representing consonant-vowel combinations).

To test this theory, Knorozov analyzed the glyphs accompanying illustrations of animals in the codices. He examined a glyph associated with the drawing of a turkey, a bird known in Yucatec Maya as *kutz*. The glyph consisted of two signs. Under Knorozov's hypothesis, the first sign represented the syllable *ku*. He knew from Landa’s manuscript that a particular glyph corresponded to the sound of the Spanish letter *u* (pronounced "oo"). Since the Maya word for turkey ends in a consonant (*tz*), Knorozov reasoned that the scribe had written the syllables *ku-tzu*, with the final vowel dropped in pronunciation—a principle Knorozov termed synharmony. To confirm this, Knorozov cross-referenced the second sign, *tzu*, with a glyph associated with a dog (*tzul* in Maya). The dog glyph was written with the sign *tzu* followed by a sign that Knorozov correctly identified as *lu*. The spelling *tzu-lu* yielded *tzul* (dog), verifying that the sign *tzu* functioned consistently across different words.

Despite the mathematical elegance of Knorozov’s methodology, his discoveries met with fierce resistance, particularly from Thompson. Operating within the heightened tensions of the Cold War, Thompson dismissed Knorozov’s work as Marxist-Leninist propaganda, arguing that the Soviet scholar was merely trying to impose dialectical materialism on ancient writing. Thompson’s denunciations kept the Western archaeological establishment aligned against Knorozov for nearly a quarter of a century. It was not until the late 1950s and 1960s, as Western scholars like Tatiana Proskouriakoff began identifying historical, rather than purely calendrical, information in Maya inscriptions, that the utility of Knorozov’s phonetic approach became undeniable. By the 1970s, Knorozov's syllabic key was widely accepted, transforming the Maya from an abstract, silent civilization into a people with a written history as detailed and personal as those of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.

According to the passage, for what reason did scholars prior to Yuri Knorozov's work dismiss Diego de Landa's written Maya "alphabet"?