Why Soviet Russia Created Mayan Playing Cards

Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura

In the 16th century, Spain conquered the powerful Maya empire, which spanned present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Belize, and northern Costa Rica. The native Mayan language was lost, along with all but four of their thousands of texts. Before the Spanish language (and thus Roman alphabet) was forced onto their tongues, the Maya had a sophisticated writing system of over 800 hieroglyphs that decorated everything from their sun-soaked temples to their bark-paper Dresden Codex. Unsurprisingly, the glyphs’ meanings proved difficult to decipher in the centuries following Spanish colonial occupation of Mesoamerica.

But one man’s eventual decoding of the highly developed script would be remembered in spades.

After 500 years of scholars theorizing over the ancient symbols, Yuriy Knorozov cracked a significant piece of the Maya code in 1952. The Soviet linguist, ethnographer, and epigrapher surmised that the glyphs in question were syllables—and not letters or purely pictorial as previously thought. To this end, Knorozov published a paper called “Ancient Writing of Central America” in which he suggested that Maya script represented phonetic sounds and thus could be interpreted similarly to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. One of the comparative linguist’s conclusions, for example, was that “because ‘west,’ in spoken Maya, is ‘chik’in,’ and ‘k’in’ is the word for sun, the…

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