>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.