Diego de Landa
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Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. He led a campaign against idolatry and human sacrifice. In doing so, he burned Maya manusc
Diego de Landa
Image of the page from Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán in which Landa describes his Maya alphabet, which was to prove instrumental in the mid-20th-century breakthrough in Maya hieroglyphics decipherment
Yuri Knorozov
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Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigraphist, and ethnologist. He is best known for the key role he played in the decipherment of the Maya script, the writing system of t
Diego de Landa
…of an alphabet, as Landa and others had originally supposed, but was rather a syllabary. That was confirmed only by the work of Soviet linguist Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s and the succeeding generation of Mayanists. Clendinnen, Inga (2003). Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (2nd…
Knorozov with Asya, his Siamese cat
Inner courtyard of the Preußische Staatsbibliothek (2005)
Knorozov on a 2022 Russian stamp