Boris Grigorievich Kudryavtsev (1920s ( 1921 or 1922 ) - 1941 or March 25, 1943 ) is a Leningrad schoolboy who made a significant contribution to decoding the written language of Easter Island (which still remains undecrypted).
| Boris Grigorievich Kudryavtsev | |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | |
| Place of Birth | |
| Date of death | or |
| Place of death | the USSR |
| Citizenship |  the USSR |
Content
Biography
Boris Kudryavtsev lived in Leningrad , the exact date of birth is unknown. As a student of secondary school No. 147 (according to the memoirs of A. I. Zhamoydy, the 109th school of the Smolninsky district of Leningrad) [1] , Boris joined the friends of the Museum of Anthropology and became a member of the circle of young ethnographers [2] .
Together with his comrades in 1940 (according to the memoirs of A. I. Zhamoida in 1938 ) Boris visited the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Having seen among the objects of the Polynesian collection that N. N. Miklouho-Maclay donated to the museum, two “ kohau rongo-rongo ”, Kudryavtsev became interested in the tablets and inscriptions on them and decided to try to decipher them, for which he brought in Valery Chernushkov (two of his classmates) ( according to A.I. Zhamoida - Valery Baitman) and Oleg Klitin (not mentioned in A.I.Zhamoida's notes; maybe he himself); they called themselves "descendants of Maclay." Schoolchildren could work with Leningrad inscriptions of rongo-rongo, as well as with photocopies of the Big Chilean sign ( H ) [3] and sign A ; the amount of available research literature was small.
After the start of World War II, Boris Kudryavtsev volunteered to go to the front, and died in the very first battle in 1941 (according to the publication of D. A. Olderogge - March 25, 1943). Boris left his research notes to Professor D. A. Olderogge , and his article “Writing Easter Island” was published in 1949 in the Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences [4] .
Kudryavtsev Group Results
Having taken an interest in the texts of the P and Q tablets stored at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography , Kudryavtsev, Chernushkov and Kitin found that approximately the same text was written on both plates; he also showed up on H (Large tablet from Santiago de Chile).
Kudryavtsev later noted that the plate K is a variant of the reverse of G ; this discovery was made simultaneously and independently of the French scientist A. Metro. Numerous parallel fragments, shorter, were later discovered by statistical analysis of the texts of the N and R tablets.
The incomplete studies of Boris Kudryavtsev testified to the independent development of the Rapanui script in particular and the entire culture of Easter Island as a whole.
Notes
Publishing a Rongo-Rongo Decoding Work
- Kudryavtsev B. G. Written language of Easter Island // Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography: [scientific articles]. - M.-L., 1949. (Collection of MAE; vol. 11). - S. 175-221.
- Olderogge D. A. Parallel texts of tables of Easter Island “kauhau rongo rongo”. Addition to the article by B. G. Kudryavtsev . // Collection of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography: [scientific articles]. - M.-L., 1949. (Collection of MAE; vol. 11). - S. 222-236.
Literature
- Rakhtanov I.A. Descendants of Maclay. - M .: Detgiz , 1956.- 102 p.