A Soviet linguist who'd never left the USSR cracked the Maya writing system by mail

Yuri Knorozov, working in Leningrad during the Cold War with no access to Mexico or its ruins, argued in 1952 that Maya glyphs were partly phonetic, not purely symbolic pictures as Western scholars insisted. His approach was dismissed for years by the field's leading authority, but it turned out to be the key that unlocked the script, and now underpins modern Maya decipherment.

— Yuri Knorozov, Ancient Writing of Central America — Sovetskaya Etnografiya, 1952