Knorozov Yuri Biography

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov Knorozov was born near Kharkov in the family of Russian intellectuals, in the city of father was the chief engineer of the Southern Trust of the building materials. In the city of Knorozov, he entered the History Faculty of Kharkov State University. With the outbreak of war, Ukraine was occupied, and Knorozov was in Moscow. Then he was drafted into the army, where he served near Moscow, a telephone operator of the artillery regiment of the reserve of the head of the commander in chief.

Immediately after the war he graduated from the History Faculty of Moscow State University, specializing in ethnography. His thesis was dedicated to Shaman practices, like the first publication, published in G. But even then Yu. Knorozov was seriously interested in deciding Mayan, contrary to the general skeptical mood. From this point of view, insoluble problems do not exist and cannot exist in any of the areas of science!

The main source for working with a letter from Maya’s letter was two books, apparently not by chance that he was in his hands: “A message about affairs in Yukatan” by Diego de Landa in the publication of Brasser de Bourbur Landa Diego de. Relation des Choses de Yucatan. Paris, and Mayan Codes in the Guatemal publication of the Villakort brothers. Villacorta J. Antonio Villacorta Y Carlos Villacorta.

Guatemala, admitted to the graduate school of Moscow State University Yu. Knorozov, was refused, and therefore the young scientist continued the decryption of the ancient letter of the Mayan in Leningrad, where he moved at the end of the 10ths. At this time, he lived and worked at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, analyzing the injured during the bombing of the collection.

Already during the life of Knorozov, he was compared with the champoline, regarding this comparison as undoubted praise. However, from the point of view of science, the intellectual breakthrough of the Russian scientist had a much more significant meaning: firstly, he did not have bilinguals of one text written in different languages, and secondly, he had to develop a method of decryption of unknown letters of writing.

Before starting work with Mayan's texts, Knorozov decided to deal with theoretical issues of deciphering ancient writing. Firstly, he clearly determined what exactly is considered a linguistic decryption to the transition to the exact phonetic reading of hieroglyphs and how it differs from the signs adopted at that time in Mayanism, which is just an attempt to assume the significance or reading of individual signs.

In addition, it was necessary to divide the concept of practically nothing in common with each other: deciphering historical systems of writing in particular Maya and decryption of secret ciphers. In ancient texts, signs are in the usual order, but their reading is forgotten; And the language is either unknown or greatly changed. In encrypted notes, known signs are replaced by others, their order is mixed, and the language should be known.

Thus, only the final result can be called common in both decoders - the achievement of understanding the recorded text. Everything else is different: the general scientific preparation of the decoder, and the volume of the text, and the methodological approach necessary for processing. The main provisions of the ancient letters of the letter were formulated by Knorozov in a software introduction, named unknown texts, to the series “Forgotten Systems of Letters: Materials on Decryption”, which began to be published in the city of a method designed by Knorosov and applied when decryption of Mayan’s letter and used to decryption of the island of Easter and Protoindia texts, received a name Positional statistics method.

The initial provisions of this method were identified by the decoders of ancient systems of writing of the first half of the 20th century and were quite successfully used during the years of Michael Ventris. Knorozov managed to summarize and develop some trips to a solid theory and decryption method. And the fidelity of theoretical developments was brilliantly proved in practice.

The essence of the “method of positional statistics” comes down to the following: by the number of signs in the letter and the frequency of the appearance of new signs in new texts, the type of writing is determined by ideographic, morphemic, syllabic, alphabetical.

Then there is an analysis of the frequency of the use of a particular sign and analysis of the positions in which this sign appears, the functions of the signs are determined. A comparison with the materials of languages, related to the language of texts allows you to identify individual grammatical, semantic referents, root and service morphemes. Then, a conditioned phonetic reading of a particular sign is revealed, a reading of the main composition of the signs is established.

The fidelity of conditional reading is confirmed by the cross -reading of the sign in different positions and texts. Having created a theoretical base for working with a Mayan letter, Yu. Knorozov translated from Old Spanish into Russian “A message about affairs in Yukatan”. And immediately I realized that the alphabet of 29 signs recorded in the XVI century. He managed to deal with the misunderstandings that arose during the dictation of the alphabet - when the informant recorded not sounds, but the name of the Spanish letters.

The decryption itself was carried out on the basis of three preserved hieroglyphic manuscripts of Maya - Paris, Madrid and Dresden.It turned out that in the texts of all three manuscripts there are independent signs. This allowed Knorozov to determine the type of writing as phonetic, morphemic -illabic. That is, each Mayan sign was read as a syllable. The difficult work ended with the main thing - reading and translating three Mayan manuscripts.

The first publication of the results of decryption, which came out in the same Soviet ethnography in the city of the brilliant discovery of Knorozov, was enthusiastically accepted by the domestic scientific community. There was a defense of the candidate dissertation as a applicant. The theme of the dissertation sounded neutral: "A message about the affairs in Yukatan Diego de Landa as an ethno-historical source." However, as the main task, the evidence of the presence of the state of the Mayan Indians and then the justification of the presence of a phonetic letter was given.

The defense took place in Moscow on March 29, the result - the confirmation of the title was not a candidate, but a doctor of historical sciences, which is extremely rare in the humanitarian region. The defense of the dissertation on the Mayan Indians became a scientific and cultural sensation in the Soviet Union, very quickly learned about decryption abroad.

It seemed a paradox - not having visited Mexico, the Soviet researcher did what many scientists from different countries have not achieved, who had conducted field research among Mayan Indians for years. The only trip of Yu. Knorozov abroad, foreign colleagues shared two camps: some immediately and unconditionally became, by definition of the famous American archaeologist, professor of Yale University of Michael Ko, Knorozovists.

Others, and first of all, the head of the American school, outstanding Mayanist Eric Thompson, took the opening of a young Soviet scientist as a personal insult. Moreover, Thompson himself, being the greatest expert on the Mayan culture, before others realized that "Knoroses are certainly right." But he did not want to voluntarily give up his positions, starting an irreconcilable war, which was based on the ideological character.

However, even the close circle of E. Thompson was quickly on the side of Knorozov. Michael Ko called the victory of Knorozov "Triumph of the Spirit." At the beginning of X, Knorozov was offered to participate in the preparation of the first computer program for machine processing of Mayan texts. A group of programmers from Novosibirsk tried to create a certain primary database on the signs of manuscripts based on the materials of Y.

Knorozov. After some time, the Novosibirsk group announced that they developed a “machine decryption theory” and published in 4 volumes a computerized Knorozov database. The publication was presented to Khrushchev. From the point of view of experts and, first of all, Knorozov himself, the declared “machine decryption” was complete stupidity and caused a puzzled reaction among specialists.

Moreover, in the city of Knorozov, “The Writing of the Mayan Indians”, revealing the principles of decryption. However, this absurd misunderstanding puzzled for some the genuine results of decryption. Abroad, the opponents also took advantage of this pretext to challenge the opening of a Soviet scientist. As a result, only after more than twenty years, the monograph was called: "Hieroglyphic manuscripts of Maya." Knorozov belongs to the galaxy of the great scientists of the 20th century, who, in heyday, seemed to be increasing more isolation in narrow areas, understand and feel that the future of science lies in the interdisciplinary approaches.

Therefore, he with enthusiasm was engaged in topics that go beyond his “narrow” specialization of the “Mayanist”. Although the decryption of hieroglyphic writing was already required a combination of knowledge on history, ethnography, linguistics and even psychophysiology. Only in order to prove the origin of the Mayan letter independent of the cultures of the Old World, Knorozov had to resolve issues related to the ethnogenesis of the Mesoamericans and with the theory of the settlement of America.

In fact, Knorozov perfectly understood that deciphering the writing system is associated with an important theoretical problem - the identification of the laws of civilizational processes. Moreover, the occasion was deeply formal: according to the classification of the levels of civilization taken from Morgan by the classic of Marxism, the Indians belonged to the “savages”, in which there could be no writing by definition.

As Yu. Knorozov noted, he "was forced to review Engels, not knowing how all this could end" to prove that "the emergence of a phonetic letter from Mayan does not contradict the Marxist dogma." So there was a topic of research, which can be defined as "the formation and development of the information field of the team." The provisions were based on the “theory of the collective”, which implies a structured “association of associations” of people, developing through the improvement of communication methods and complicating intra -collection connections.

The Association of people of Knoroses did not consider as a further development or the highest form of animal unification, but as the next type of differentiated system - “Association of associations”. At the same time, the component of the unit of the Association of People not coinciding with society is not an individual, but a team. Knorozov turned to the Law of Haeckel recapitulation, according to which the development of an individual repeats the development of the species and, applying it to the development of civilization as a reproducing system, proposed an important clarification: "Ontogenesis repeats the phylogenesis with an inversely proportional speed." This systemic property is inherent in the components of the “universal system” - for example, the development of the intellectual potential of Homo sapiens and the team.

Priority attention was paid to the formation of communication to the methods of transmitting and fixing information - the occurrence of sounds, denominations, drawings, letters, and models of social behavior. The main provisions were set out in the article “On the issue of the classification of alarm”, published in the journal “The Main Problems of Africanism” in the city to solve these problems, Yu.

Knorozov turned to the study of the intellectual and cognitive activity of children and the comparison of the stages of development of the child with the stages of development of society. He paid close attention to the general problems of the semiotics, even creating a special group of ethnic semiotics, which regularly published collections with the same name. It was increasingly attracted by topics related to the work of the human brain, its functional organization.