Nikolai Grube

Nikolai Grube (born 1962) is a German epigrapher. Grube entered the University of Hamburg in 1982 and graduated in 1985. Nikolai Grube has been heavily involved in the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script.

Biography He was born in Bonn in 1962. He has served as professor of anthropology and art history at both the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Bonn. At the University of Bonn, he has worked in the Seminar for Ethnology. Nikolai Grube worked with Linda Schele in presenting hieroglyphic workshops for native Mayan speakers in Mexico and Guatemala.

In the 1990s, he visited Naachtun in Petén and recorded the inscriptions on the Maya stelae. He is credited with deciphering the ancient name of the kingdom from the hieroglyphic inscription on Stela 1 at the city.

From 1992 to 1995, Grube received funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ("German Research Foundation") for a project investigating the oral traditions of the Cruzoob Maya of Mexico. Nikolai Grube is co-editor of the Mexicon journal and is a consultant for the Mexican magazine Arqueología Mexicana ("Mexican Archaeology"). It is housed in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn and was established with funding from the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. The goal of the project is to conduct computer-based studies of all extant Maya hieroglyphic texts from an epigraphic and cultural-historical standpoint, and to produce and publish a database and a comprehensive dictionary of the Classic Mayan language.