I'd say it's worse--remember, the Library of Alexandria actually got partially (and usually accidentally) burned down several times throughout antiquity, and by the time it was destroyed on the Pope's orders, it was largely in ruins already. The destruction of Mayan codices was purposeful and malicious, and happened all at once at the hands of Christian fanatics out to destroy civilization--in other words, it actually was the kind of crime against humanity that popular history imagines the burning of the Museion was.

>Also, his transcription was fundamentaly flawed so it didn't work when later scholars tried to use it for translation that's why it was ignored for decades until Knorozov's work

As the article points out, Eric Thompson’s stranglehold on Maya studies is another reason it was Knorozov who made the breakthrough. American and European scholars were aware of the de Landa alphabet; it just wasn’t utilized to its maximum potential because there was so much resistance to the idea of Maya glyphs representing phonemes.

To quote Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code,

>Until his death in 1975, only a few months after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, John Eric Sidney Thompson dominated modern Maya studies by sheer force of intellect and personality. Thompson never held a university post and never had any students; he never wielded power as a member of a grantgiving committee, or as an editor of a national journal; and within the organization that he served for so many years, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he made no executive decisions. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, it was a brave or foolhardy Mayanist who dared go against his opinion…

>Thompson made some tremendous discoveries and should be given credit for them. Nevertheless, his role in cracking the Maya script was an entirely negative one, as stultifying and wrong as had been Athanasius Kircher’s in holding back decipherment of ancient Egyptian for almost two centuries…

>As might be expected, Thompson’s views on the Landa “alphabet” were distinctly ambivalent, but he was the first to see that Landa’s ti sign which ends his sample sentence ma in kati (“I don’t want to”) functions as the Yucatec locative preposition ti’, “at,” “on”; that it could also have functioned as a purely phonetic-syllabic sign, as the bishop implied, was something that Eric simply could not allow…

>These decipherments were all major advances, but Thompson failed to follow them up. Why? The answer is that Thompson was a captive of that same mindset that had led in the first century before Christ to the absurd interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Diodorus Siculus, to the equally absurd fourth-century AD Neoplatonist nonsense of Horapollon, and to the sixteenth-century fantasies of Athanasius Kircher. Eric had ignored the lesson of Champollion.

>In a chapter entitled “Glances Backward and a Look Ahead,” Thompson sums up his views on Maya hieroglyphic writing. “The glyphs are anagogical,” he says… The glyphs are not expressing something as mundane and down-to-earth as language, but something much deeper, according to Thompson.

Every decipherment has drawn upon earlier work — Thomas Young on Egyptian, Alice Kober on Linear B, Ignace Gelb and Piero Meriggi on Anatolian hieroglyphs, etc. — and that does not at all diminish Knorozov’s remarkable accomplishment.

>...burnt hundreds if not thousands of Mayan codices, in a tragedy for the study of history that's comparable to the fire at the libary of Alexanderia.

Some overstatement here? Was this Mayan language capable of informing on their way of life? Could it reference law, history, philosophy, important historical figures, as historical western languages could? Or did the destruction you speak of eradicate our ability to answer that Q?

>A source discussing a second way of Mayan communication:

>The Incas did not have a written language. Nonetheless, they adopted a unique system of recording information from their predecessors. This ancient “operating system,” called quipus, dates back to 2600 BCE. “They were like early computers, early counting machines,” says author and four-time Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker Kim MacQuarrie...

>A quipu, also spelled khipu, qipu or kipu, is an intricate system of knotted strings of various colors that store and convey information. Quipu literally translates to “knot” in Quechua. Many ancient Andean cultures used this knot system, including the Inca. Sometimes referred to as “talking knots,” they served as a writing system. This was crucial since there was no formal written language. Though just strings and knots, the arrangement was extremely precise and sophisticated, communicating everything from accounting to genealogy. Made from cotton or camelid fibers, quipus were portable making it easy to transfer information over distances and store over time.

Weren't quipu primarily used for accounting by taxation purposes by officials, and perhaps census information, and similarly could not convey information on law, history, customs....? Or is that wrong also?