Knorozov, an epigrapher and ethnographer was best known for the important role his research played in the decipherment of the Mayan script. In the ‘Language of the Proto-Indian Inscriptions,’ the Russian scholar reached a conclusion that the symbols at the Indus Valley ruins represented a logosyllabic script. “There is reason to consider the Proto-Indian as being close to the Dravidian languages as far as grammatical structure is concerned,” he wrote.

Using a computer analysis, Knorozov suggested that an underlying Dravidian language was what people probably spoke in the Indus Valley.

Knorozov worked closely with Nikita Gurov, one the greatest Indologists of all time in Russia and another strong proponent that the language of the Indus Valley civilization was probably an older Dravidian one. Few scholars in India could match the linguistic prowess of Gurov, who even managed to identify 80 words of Dravidian origin in the Rig Veda. Gurov and Knorozov co-authored Proto-Indica, a report on the investigation of Indian texts. argued in many publications that the Brahmi script was most likely connected to the Indus Valley script and not derived from one of the Semitic scripts.