The Maya are still around, but the Maya civilization's institutions were all destroyed. And the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books [1] they could find and burning them. So a lot of knowledge was lost.
They're comparable in that sense to the Heculaneum manuscripts, which researchers have lately made great progress on with deep learning [1]. I hope an equivalent initiative someday starts on the Quipu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu [1] https://www2.cs.uky.edu/dri/herculaneum-papyrus-scrolls/
It's unlikely any complex narratives could be encoded there, though.
Possibly a bit like the e.g. the Mycenaean Linear B script. Which is fully decoded and well understood. But despite having a full fledged writing system they mainly used it for accounting and such. They can tell us about how many goats, sheep and various good they had they had but don't tell as much about the society or history as such.
Heculaneum manuscripts are kind of the opposite from the Quipu in the sense that we have zero issues understanding the actual text/symbols just extracting them from the destroyed scrolls is rather complicated.
Minoan tablets are maybe a bit closer and little progress has been made there (then again we are fully capable of reading the script just have no clue about the language it was written in).
For a long time, it was thought that they indeed contained only the latter, but my certainly non-specialist grasp on the matter is that we now know they were used to encode much more than that. In addition to being used directly to verify calculations [0], they contained "histories, laws and ceremonies, and economic accounts" or, as the Spanish testified at the time: "[W]hatever books can tell of histories and laws and ceremonies and accounts of business is all supplied by the quipus so accurately that the result is astonishing"[1]. My---again crude---understanding is this was through embedding categories, names and relational data in addition to numbers, signaled not least through texture and color [2].
I likely come across as if I'm trying to over-inflate the Incan knots, but really it's just to say they appear to be a rather fascinating in-between of legal-administrative inscriptions, whose discovery transformed understanding of Roman institutions over the last century or so, and the straight-forward manuscripts of the Herculaneum.
[0] My elementary and probably out-of-date recollection: an emissary would come to towns with Quipus containing work orders, which would be validated with the community on the spot.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27087183
[2] https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-abstract/65..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/483319
Potentially a graph to be completed by the owner via verbal communication/interpretation as a supplement to the material instrument; a single source of information that could be interpreted differently depending on the societal role and vocation of the owner.
> We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
Strange times, those, eh?
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.