I’m not certain about the spelling of ‘hieroglyphs’, but I’m sure you understand I’m writing about that ancient Egyptian language. So, if the Rosetta Stone hadn’t been found, would scientists ever have been able to decypher (not sure about the spelling of that word either…) Egyptian? If so, how?
Probably.
There are other ways to decode a language than having a 1:1 text handy. There are two examples of this that I’m, marginally, aware of.
The people on Easter Island, who did the big stone head thing, left behind a small number of, “rongorongo” which are markings engraved on wood. Steven Fischer has been working on translating them for a number of years. You can check out his progress, minimal it seems, here .
The Mayan language of central America is being worked on by doing some sort of mathmatical analysis and comparing the results to some known events, their reasonably well known calendar, etc. At least that’s what I seem to remember from some TLC show or another.
The Egyptian writing would be, IMHO, much easier than either of the above two since there was more interaction between Egypt and the other civilizations that Europeans are directly descended from.
I agree. The Mayan example is a good one. Linguist also relied on the the surviving Mayan dialects to work out the use of symbols to represent sounds.
True, but the branch of languages that Ancient Egyptian belonged to (the Egyptian branch of the Afro-Semitic family) is no longer spoken — the last member of the family, Coptic, died out as a “living language” in the sixteenth century. (Modern Egyptians speak a dialect of Arabic.) To compare, this would be as if we were trying to decipher Latin without the existence of Latin speakers, or speakers of any other Romance language.
Coptic is still used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church, and there are millions of people with at least some familiarity with it, and a decent number of people who could be considered fluent in it. There were native speakers of Coptic up to the late 19th century.
Linear B was one language represented by a type of heiroglyph - in that some words are representations of the things they name.
This was solved without any Rosetta Stone, instead it took genius and intuitive guesswork, some of the charts used and methods of elimination would have been suited to computers.
It took a knowledge of ancient place names to solve it, and eventually a hunch that it was a form of early Greek.
http://www.varchive.org/dag/decipher.htm
http://www.ancientscripts.com/linearb.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/linear-b.shtml
Even with the Rosetta Stone it was not a straightforward matter to decipher Ancient Egyptian writing, but given the contacts that civilisation had with the rest of the Ancient world, and the huge wealth of material compared to that of Linear B, it seems more than likely that Egyptian Heiroglyphs would have been solved without the Rosetta Stone.