[aruanan]

But long before the Maya used the Roman alphabet, they had created their own rich and elegant script, featuring more than 800 hieroglyphs.

If there were only about 800 hieroglyphs, it was not a rich script. Compare this to a 4 year old child who has a vocabulary of about 2000 words. Chinese has over 80,000 characters. If you know about 3000 of the most common characters, you can read most of anything that appears in common usage; double that for literature or technical writing (for most of science and medicine, they use standard English texts that they pirate). And since many "words" are combinations of two or more characters, the language can represent many subtle concepts. Of course, Chinese has about 2000 years on the Mayan hieroglyphic language. I'm betting that most of the language is dedicated to describing how cool any particular leader was or keeping inventory of tribute or how to calculate the number of victims necessary for sacrifices to get the cosmos back into adjustment after any of the standard causes of perturbation.

At least with alphabetic writing you could have slaves in mines writing their thoughts on the walls.

[Redcitizen]

At least with alphabetic writing you could have slaves in mines writing their thoughts on the walls.

With Alphabetic writing, people post their thoughts on bathroom walls. Some things never change.