Title says it all really. I (think) I know enough to say "The stone is THE (and only) reason we understand Egyptian hieroglyphics."
But is this true, or was it just the first thing we found? Have other sources been found and/or could we have eventually deciphered the writing without the use of the stone ? Or, if it hadn't been found, would we still be in the dark?
hi.. just a quick mod note to both the OP and potential answerers: This subreddit does not permit "what if" questions, nor answers based on speculation/conjecture. However this post has been left up because there's enough left to tackle here: Is the Rosetta Stone as important as people think? Is it the only reason we understand hieroglyphics? Was it the first thing found? Have other sources been found? and so on.
Here are two previous threads which discuss this question. There aren't definitive answers, since it's a counter factual, but there's interesting info about the limitations of modern cryptography in regards to hieroglyphs and other ancient writing systems. For example, even if you can ascribe phonetic or morphological values to all the symbols you encounter, you're still dealing with a distant culture with different idiomatic expressions. Even today Egyptologists have a restricted ability to ascertain the meanings of the texts they work on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25spg2/without_the_rosetta_stone_could_modern/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25bh2p/if_we_had_never_discovered_the_rosetta_stone/