DURING the final days of the Red Army’s fierce battle for Berlin, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, a Soviet artillery soldier, found boxes of books in front of the Prussian State Library. Clearly, the Germans hadn’t managed to remove and put them somewhere safer as they did with so many works of art before the advance of the Allied troops. Knorosov, who had begun studying ethnology in Moscow before war broke out, was hungry for books and rummaged through the boxes. Fortunately, they were still in good condition; neither vandalised, ruined by debris from bombs or scuffed amid the street-fighting. He found a treasure: an edition of Diego de Landa’s “Relación de las cosas de Yucatán” (“Narrative of the things of Yucatán”). Though written in 1566, it is still seen as the authority on Mayan life, religion and culture. Ironically, de Landa was also responsible for the destruction of a large proportion of works in 1561 which contained the icons and hieroglyphs of the Mayan language. Those included the famous Mayan codices, folding books made of what the Maya called huun-paper. Apparently it was more durable and had a better writing surface than papyrus. But as a bishop, de Landa felt that “none of them was free of superstition and devilish illusion.” Yet in his own book he describes Mayan life and culture including their calendar, their architecture, the floral and the animal world using Roman letters for the phonemes he heard in the Mayan language. His work made it possible to decipher around one-third of the Mayan hieroglyphs.

Knorosov’s precious loot is said to have also included reproductions of the three Maya codices that survived the destruction by the conquistadores, named after the cities where they have been brought—Paris, Madrid and Dresden. The Dresden codex is considered the most precious, as the oldest (from around 1250) and best preserved. Back home in Leningrad, Knorosov began to study the hieroglyphs with great enthusiasm. He “knew that the Maya script—with its 800 or so characters—could not have been an alphabet in which each letter matches one phoneme”, says Nikolai Grube, an epigrapher and anthropologist at Bonn University. (A phoneme is a single sound, like f or o.) “But it could also not have been a pure script of words or terms, since no language works with just 800 words.” The Mayan writing system, it seemed, represented syllables: bigger than phonemes but smaller than words.

“The least likely person one would ever have thought to have made the greatest of all breakthroughs in the Maya decipherment was a Soviet citizen, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov”, asserts Michael Coe, an American anthropologist and archaeologist, in a documentary in 2008. Yet it took a few decades before Knorosov gained the appreciation he deserved. His findings, published in 1952 in a Soviet journal, Sovyetska Ethnographica (“Soviet Ethnography”), were trumpeted by the Soviet propaganda apparatus as a kind of defeat of the capitalist world. “This young scholar has done what none of the imperialist scholars in Britain or the United States or Germany could ever do,” they proclaimed. “He’s shown how the Maya wrote.” Many in Britain dismissed the findings as Marxist propaganda.