Fun fact: Yuri Knorozov listed his cat, Asya, as a co-author on much of his work, and when his publishing house blacked out her name, he started using a photo of himself holding her as his official author picture, though they ended up cropping her out. Knorozov got the last laugh, though, as the photo of him holding Asya is now immortalized in a stone statue commemorating his work on Maya Hieroglyphs in Mérida, Yucatan.

What you just learned in 16 minutes, many people paid to sit in a college class and pay a hefty tuition fee.

It must have been amazing to participate in that Palenque roundtable. Imagine being in the room as your field completely transforms in real time.

I absolutely love this channel, not only does he dunk on conspiracy theorists (which I love) but he also answers viewers questions and speaks about a range of ancient topics and cultures! Always a pleasure when he uploads.

I'm Mexican and my highschool principal used to give us random talks about topics he knew next to nothing about. He told us the Mayan never developed a writing system.

I never get tired of hearing this story!

Your presentation style is authoritative and witty at once while building drama and interest...like a great movie. No kidding. An utterly fascinating story of discovery. Thanks for your terrific videos.

Great summary! In the 1980s I was fascinated by the Maya, and I spent a nontrivial chunk of my student budget to buy Thompson's book. I was quite disappointed -- but it took me ten years to learn what a waste of money that

This guy is awesome!! So happy to have stumbled across this channel. Been binging it for the past day or so

I am old enough to have witnessed the rediscovery of Mayan writing. And history

I watched a NOVA show that talked about David Stuart's work. His archeologist Dad brought him on Central American trips when he was 3, by 8 he was deciphering glyphs, and by 18 had made significant contributions to the field. I love this story - such a young kid!!

Thank you. I'm not an archaeologist or a linguist however, I found this fascinating.

Fantastic discussion. Really appreciate how you wove in the significance of these hypotheses, and how understanding the language by identifying an appropriate pattern from ethnological research ultimately unlocked an understanding of Mayan society and resituated them as recognizably human rather than mystical outliers.

I like the story of the kid who recognized the small and large forms of the same glyph also! That reduced drastically the number of syllables!

The dropping of the final vowel in Mayan spoken language but not in writing reminds me of Dutch, how when verbs end in "en" it's softened and pronounced more like "uh" - something you wouldn't know from just reading the language.

I bet that deep learning trained on all known writing systems could help in deciphering some of the undeciphered writing systems that are left (at least those that are technically possible), extracting what is essentially our human thought process in creating languages and applying that to new ones.

Fascinating, not only for the discoveries leading to knowledge of the writing, history and culture of the Maya, but also of the conflicts that sometimes arise within academic circles as well as the cooperation that can lead to such discoveries. Thanks for this wonderful video Professor Miano.

Thank you David for teaching the truth and helping to fix people's ignorance.

I met Linda Schele. In fact, I knew quite a few of those Mayan translators back in the day.

I started learning about the Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures the day Michael D. Coe (coincidence but interesting coincidence.) and haven't stopped since. I was looking at google pictures of hieroglyphs looking for Egyptian, but saw the glyphic name Pakal and it continued in earnest from there. I plan to be an archaeologist specializing in them one day.