Rosetta Stone Destroyed or Never Found.

Just how much would the study of Egyptian history be affected if the Rosetta stone was either never found or destroyed? Would we eventually have been able to decipher the language anyway or would it have remained a mystery? How would have the general understanding of ancient history have been altered.
 
The previous thread has already been referenced, but the short version is that the Rosetta Stone is over-rated. There were multiple bilingual decrees around, and even multiple versions of the Rosetta Stone's inscription. Things get set back a bit without the Rosetta Stone, but in the long run we would still be able to read heiroglyphs pretty well.
 
The previous thread has already been referenced, but the short version is that the Rosetta Stone is over-rated. There were multiple bilingual decrees around, and even multiple versions of the Rosetta Stone's inscription. Things get set back a bit without the Rosetta Stone, but in the long run we would still be able to read heiroglyphs pretty well.

Why is Rosetta always in red in that thread and why are people worried about it being hit by a cannonball? Is that spacecraft important to AH.com?
 
If you use the search function to find a certain word, that word will appear highlighted in red.

yeah, that was me :p i used the search function to find the thread and didn't bother to take the highlighting out of the URL. as to the cannonball, that was my actual supposition--that the Rosetta Stone is never found because it's destroyed by a stray cannonball during the Napoleonic Wars
 
Lets take the question as being "suppose the hieroglyphs had never been deciphered"

For one thing, there would probably be a lot more occult nonsense about them, such as the idea that the Tarot cards were originally "the book of Thoth".

Without them, the evolution ascribed to Akhenaten would be unknown, which would have had a major effect on the history of religion.
 
Lets take the question as being "suppose the hieroglyphs had never been deciphered"

I think this is unrealistic. People will find a bilingual at some point to either crack them, or crack cuneiform and them turn unto cuneiform-hieroglyphs (IIRC, cuneiform was partly deciphered through hieroglyphs IOTL).
Even without this, at some point computation and mathematical theories behind encryption theory will develop enough to make pull a Ventris on them, working backwards from Coptic. It would be far more difficult than what Ventirs actually did on Linear B, of course. So, I think that it is likely that, by this day, Ancient Egyptian would be readable for scholars. However, this would set back Egyptology more than a century and half. Considering what a mine of knowledge on Antiquity Egypt turned out to be, the consequences would still be very significant: for one, Egyptian nationalism would be a very different beast.
 
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