If the Rosetta Stone was never found, have we discovered anything since that would have enabled us to decipher Ancient Egyptian?

by cmd194
Trevor_Culley

Yes! Through a variety of different possibilities.

The most obvious option would simply be to apply the same process used by Champollion to one of the many other bilingual or trilingual inscriptions found in Egypt that used both hieroglyphs and Ancient Greek to convey the same message. There are so many that several whole books have been written on that topic or compiling them together. This book is one of the more recent examples. Remember, Egypt was ruled by Greek speakers for almost 1000 years, first under the Macedonian Ptolemies, and then as part of the Roman Empire. Many, many monuments were built featuring both scripts, often accompanied by Egyptian Demotic..

If nothing about history changed except the Rosetta Stone was ground into dust at some point, the most likely object to fill its place in history would be the Philae Obelisk. It was excavated/looted from Egypt by William John Banks in 1815 precisely because it featured both Greek and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. At that time, Jean-Francois Champollion was still working on the Rosetta Stone, though he had already announced that he though he had cracked it. Part of that work was reconstructing "Cleopatra" in hieroglyphs, and since the obelisk mentions both Cleopatra II and III it helped verify Champollion's ongoing work. This is actually a key part to deciphering any lost script. No matter how sure the translator is working off of one example, it should also work on a second text.

If by some twist of reality, none of these were found it would still be possible though. Just harder. The first possibility would be The Suez Inscription of Darius the Great, written in four languages: Old Persian, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Akkadian, and Elamite. In the early 19th Century, none of those four languages was deciphered, but Old Persian was close enough to Modern and Middle Persian and ancient Avestan that linguists could work backward based on known names and titles from Persian history. I describe that process more in this thread.

The decipherment of Old Persian allowed translators to used Persian inscriptions much like the Rosetta Stone to decipher Akkadian and Elamite, and from there to decipher many ancient Near Eastern languages. The same system could plausibly have been applied to hieroglyphs.

On one hand, this gets into a bit of a chicken or the egg arguments because a vase featuring both Old Persian and (already deciphered) hieroglyphs was an important tool in the early stages of deciphering Old Persian, and they did employ the same system pioneered by Champollion. However, the tactics ultimately employed to decipher Old Persian could have succeeded without it.

That's almost exactly what happened with the Linear B script from the Mycenean Greek civilization. Once a sufficient number of texts had been published, Michael Ventris was able to identify commonly repeated words as place-names and made the educated guess that Linear B was a form of Greek. From there, he and other scholars worked backward from known Greek to Linear B. Interesting to note that the same tactics have been applied to translate other lost scripts, like Linear Elamite, a process that was published by Francois Desset et al. for the first time this morning.

That tactic could also have been employed on hieroglyphs, though potentially requiring a few more stages. The modern Coptic language is descended from Ancient Egyptian, and the same basic idea could have been applied to hieroglyphs as Linear B or Old Persian. The potential stumbling block would be that Egyptian hieroglyphs cover a huge range of time with linguistic variation. Working back from Coptic may have been easier if Coptic was first used to translate the Demotic script (with or without the benefit of multi-lingual inscriptions). In fact, that's basically what Champollion did. He took a guess with Coptic and translated the Demotic section of the Rosetta Stone first and then made the leap to suggesting that the hieroglyphs were the same language. The process was then easier because it was the same message, but that logic could have been used to work out the sounds indicated by roughly contemporary texts that mentioned the same names.

Finally, if by whatever twist of reality we still had not translated Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the modern day, we'd either still be working on it or just have figured it out recently. Despite a lot of interest in the potential for machine translation to decipher lost languages, that is still a work in progress. However, it is close. As of 2020, a team at MIT was working on an algorithm that could successfully translate ancient scripts with only knowledge of other known languages. I'm not the best person to explain a computer algorithm, so if you want the full details you can read their publication. Essentially, it uses the same method as Ventris and Desset, but a computer can hold and process all of the machine translating information of every known language (or close enough) and accurately identify shared linguistic features. However, the same methods are yet to succeed with any ancient script that doesn't have an obvious known language for comparison as a starting point.