But long before the Maya used the Roman alphabet, they had created their own rich and elegant script, featuring more than 800 hieroglyphs.It may have been a very nice script -- even a wonderful one -- but why "elegant"? I suspect learning all those glyphs would have been difficult.
The script certainly wouldn't have been "elegant" in the scientific sense -- "gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct."
That's the thing about political correctness. We want to be fair to all manner of groups, but some people really make fools of themselves in bending over backwards to be accomodating.
Ignore the political correctness. Academics can't help themselves. The lack of useful information (science, mathematics, philosophy) delegates this culture to the primitive category, no matter what attempts are made to glorify it.
The remarkable thing about the progress of deciphering this primitive language is that it was apparently harder and longer-lasting than wartime military codes!
The discovery that the symbols also represent sounds is also quite a feat, if true.