Rongorongo
Encyclopedia
Rongorongo is a system of glyph
s discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island
that appears to be writing
or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical
and what might prove to be genealogical
information has been identified, not even these glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing, it could be one of as few as three or four independent inventions of writing in human history.
Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a bird-man
statuette, and two reimiro
ornaments. There are also a few petroglyph
s which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred.
Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon
. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting
carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact
and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as and have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing ears or eyes.
Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The somewhat variable names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.
it means "to recite, to declaim, to chant out".
The original name—or perhaps description—of the script is said to have been kohau motu mo rongorongo, "lines incised for chanting out", shortened to kohau rongorongo or "lines [for] chanting out". There are also said to have been more specific names for the texts based on their topic. For example, the kohau ta‘u ("lines of years") were annals, the kohau îka ("lines of fishes") were lists of persons killed in war (îka "fish" was homophonous with or used figuratively for "war casualty"), and the kohau ranga "lines of fugitives" were lists of war refugees.
Some authors have understood the ta‘u in kohau ta‘u to refer to a separate form of writing distinct from rongorongo. Barthel recorded that, "The Islanders had another writing (the so-called 'ta‘u script') which recorded their annals and other secular matters, but this has disappeared." However, Fischer writes that "the ta‘u was originally a type of rongorongo inscription. In the 1880s, a group of elders invented a derivative 'script' [also] called ta‘u with which to decorate carvings in order to increase their trading value. It is a primitive imitation of rongorongo." An alleged third script, the mama or va‘eva‘e described in some mid-twentieth-century publications, was "an early twentieth-century geometric [decorative] invention".
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The forms of the glyphs are standardized contours of living organisms and geometric designs about one centimeter high. The wooden tablets are irregular in shape and, in many instances, fluted
(tablets B, E, G, H, O, Q, and possibly T), with the glyphs carved in shallow channels running the length of the tablets, as can be seen in the image of tablet G at right. It is thought that irregular and often blemished pieces of wood were used in their entirety rather than squared off due to the scarcity of wood on the island.
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Except for a few possible glyphs cut in stone (see petroglyphs), all surviving texts are inscribed in wood. According to tradition, the tablets were made of toromiro
wood. However, Orliac (2005) examined seven objects (tablets B, C, G, H, K, Q, and reimiro L) with stereo optical
and scanning electron microscope
s and determined that all were instead made from Pacific rosewood (Thespesia populnea); the same identification had been made for tablet M in 1934. This 15-meter tree, known as "Pacific rosewood" for its color and called mako‘i in Rapanui, is used for sacred groves and carvings throughout eastern Polynesia and was evidently brought to Easter Island by the first settlers. However, not all the wood was native: Orliac (2007) established that tablets N, P, and S were made of South African Yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius)
and therefore that the wood had arrived with Western contact. Fischer describes P as "a damaged and reshapen European or American oar", as are A (which is European ash, Fraxinus excelsior) and V; says that wood from the wreck of a Western boat was said to have been used for many tablets; and that both P and S had been recycled as planking for a Rapanui driftwood canoe. Several texts, including O, are carved on gnarled driftwood
. The fact that the islanders were reduced to inscribing driftwood, and were regardless extremely economical in their use of wood, may have had consequences for the structure of the script, such as the abundance of ligatures and potentially a telegraphic style of writing that would complicate textual analysis.
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Oral tradition holds that, because of the great value of wood, only expert scribes used it, while pupils wrote on banana leaves. German ethnologist Thomas Barthel
believed that carving on wood was a secondary development in the evolution of the script based on an earlier stage of incising banana leaves or the sheaths of the banana trunk with a bone stylus, and that the medium of leaves was retained not only for lessons but to plan and compose the texts of the wooden tablets. He found experimentally that the glyphs were quite visible on banana leaves due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. However, when the leaves themselves dried they became brittle and would not have survived for long.
Barthel speculated that the banana leaf might even have served as a prototype for the tablets, with the fluted surface of the tablets an emulation of the veined structure of a leaf:
, left to right and bottom to top. That is, the reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line. When reading one line, the lines above and below it would appear upside down, as can be seen in the image at left.
However, the writing continues onto the second side of a tablet at the point where it finishes off the first, so if the first side has an odd number of lines, as is the case with tablets K, N, P, and Q, the second will start at the upper left-hand corner, and the direction of writing shifts to top to bottom.
Larger tablets and staves may have been read without turning, if the reader were able to read upside-down.
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According to oral tradition, scribes used obsidian flakes or small shark teeth
, presumably the hafted
tools still used to carve wood in Polynesia, to flute and polish the tablets and then to incise the glyphs. (See shark tooth tools.) The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though superficial hair-line cuts are also found. In the closeup image at right, a glyph is composed of two parts connected by a hair-line cut; this is a typical convention for this shape. Several researchers, including Barthel, believe that these superficial cuts were made by obsidian, and that the texts were carved in a two-stage process, first sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a worn shark tooth. The remaining hair-line cuts were then either errors, design conventions (as at right), or decorative embellishments. Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hair-line cuts, as can be seen repeatedly in the closeup of one end of tablet B below. However, Barthel was also told that the last literate Rapanui king, Nga‘ara
, sketched out the glyphs in soot with a fish bone and then engraved them with a shark tooth.
Tablet N
, on the other hand, shows no sign of shark teeth. Haberlandt noticed that the glyphs of this text appear to have been incised with a sharpened bone, as evidenced by the shallowness and width of the grooves. N also "displays secondary working with obsidian flakes to elaborate details within the finished contour lines. No other rongo-rongo inscription reveals such graphic extravagance".
Other tablets appear to have been cut with a steel blade, often rather crudely. Although steel knives were available after the arrival of the Spanish, this does cast suspicion on the authenticity of these tablets.
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The glyphs are stylized human, animal, vegetable and geometric shapes, and often form compounds. Nearly all those with heads are oriented head up and are either seen face on or in profile to the right, in the direction of writing. It is not known what significance turning a glyph head down or to the left may have had. Heads often have characteristic projections on the sides which may be eyes (as on the sea turtle
glyph below, and more clearly on sea-turtle petroglyphs) but which often resemble ears (as on the anthropomorphic petroglyph in the next section). Birds are common; many resemble the frigatebird
(see image directly below) which was associated with the supreme god Makemake
. Other glyphs look like fish or arthropods. A few, but only a few, are similar to petroglyphs found throughout the island.
or Tu‘u ko Iho, the legendary founder(s) of Rapa Nui, brought 67 tablets from their homeland. The same founder is also credited with bringing indigenous plants such as the toromiro
. However, there is no homeland likely to have had a tradition of writing in Polynesia or even in South America. Thus rongorongo appears to have been an internal development. Given that few if any of the Rapanui people remaining on the island in the 1870s could read the glyphs, it is likely that only a small minority were ever literate. Indeed, early visitors were told that literacy was a privilege of the ruling families and priests who were all kidnapped in the Peruvian slaving raids or died soon afterwards in the resulting epidemics.
(Small Saint Petersburg) is the sole item that has been carbon dated
but the results only constrain the date to sometime after 1680.
Direct dating is not the only evidence. Texts A, P, and V can be dated to the 18th or 19th century by virtue of being inscribed on European oars. Orliac (2005) calculated that the wood for tablet C
(Mamari) was cut from the trunk of a tree some 15 metres (49.2 ft) tall, and Easter Island has long been deforested of trees that size. Analysis of charcoal indicates that the forest disappeared in the first half of the 17th century. Roggeveen
, who discovered Easter Island in 1722, described the island as "destitute of large trees" and in 1770 González de Ahedo
wrote, "Not a single tree is to be found capable of furnishing a plank so much as six inches [15 cm] in width." Forster, with Cook's
expedition of 1774, reported that "there was not a tree upon the island which exceeded the height of 10 feet [3 m]."
All of these methods date the wood, not the inscription. However, Pacific rosewood is not durable, and is unlikely to survive long in Easter Island's climate. On the other hand, glyph 67 (
) is thought to represent the extinct Easter Island palm
, which seems to have disappeared from the island's pollen record
circa 1650, suggesting that the script itself is at least that old. The start of forest clearing for agriculture, and thus presumably colonization, has been dated to circa 1200, implying a date for the invention of rongorongo no earlier than the 13th century.
. A signing ceremony was held in which a treaty of annexation was signed by an undisclosed number of chiefs "by marking upon it certain characters in their own form of script." (Reproduction at right)
Several scholars have suggested that rongorongo may have been a invention inspired by this visit and the signing of the treaty of annexation. As circumstantial evidence, they note that no explorer reported the script prior to Eugène Eyraud
in 1864, and are of the opinion that the marks with which the chiefs signed the Spanish treaty do not resemble rongorongo.
The hypothesis of these researchers is not that rongorongo was itself a copy of the Latin alphabet, or of any other form of writing, but that the concept of writing had been conveyed in a process anthropologists term trans-cultural diffusion, which then inspired the islanders to invent their own system of writing. If this is the case, then rongorongo emerged, flourished, fell into oblivion, and was all but forgotten within a span of less than a hundred years. However, known cases of the diffusion of writing, such as Sequoyah
's invention of the Cherokee syllabary
after seeing the power of English-language newspapers, or Uyaquk
's invention of the Yugtun script
inspired by readings from Christian scripture, involved greater contact than the signing of a single treaty. In addition, the glyphs could easily be crudely written rongorongo, as might be expected for Rapa Nui representatives writing with the novel instrument of pen on paper. The fact that the script was not otherwise observed by early explorers, who spent little time on the island, may simply reflect that it was taboo at the time; such taboos may have lost power along with the tangata rongorongo (scribes) by the time Rapanui society collapsed following European slaving raids and the resulting epidemics, so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day. As Orliac pointed out, Tablet C would appear to predate the Spanish visit by at least a century.
Easter Island has the richest assortment of petroglyph
s in Polynesia. Nearly every suitable surface has been carved, including the stone walls of some houses and a few of the famous mo‘ai
statues and their fallen topknots. Around one thousand sites with over four thousand glyphs have been catalogued, some in bas- or sunken-relief, and some painted red and white. Designs include a concentration of chimeric
bird-man figures at Orongo
, a ceremonial center of the tangata manu
("bird-man") cult; faces of the creation deity Makemake
; marine animals like turtles, tuna, swordfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, crabs, and octopus (some with human faces); roosters; canoes, and over five hundred komari (vulvas). Petroglyphs are often accompanied by carved divots ("cupules") in the rock. Changing traditions are preserved in bas-relief birdmen, which were carved over simpler outline forms and in turn carved over with komari. Although the petroglyphs cannot be directly dated, some are partially obscured by pre-colonial stone buildings, suggesting they are relatively old.
Several of the anthropomorphic and animal-form petroglyphs have parallels in rongorongo, for instance a double-headed frigatebird
(glyph 680) on a fallen mo‘ai topknot, a figure which also appears on a dozen tablets. McLaughlin (2004) illustrates the most prominent correspondences with the petroglyph corpus of Lee (1992). However, these are mostly isolated glyphs; few text-like sequences or ligatures have been found among the petroglyphs. This has led to the suggestion that rongorongo must be a recent creation, perhaps inspired by petroglyph designs or retaining individual petroglyphs as logogram
s (Macri 1995), but not old enough to have been incorporated into the petroglyphic tradition. The most complex candidate for petroglyphic rongorongo is what appears to be a short sequence of glyphs, one of which is a ligature, carved on the wall of a cave. However, the sequence does not appear to have been carved in a single hand (see image at right), and the cave is located near the house that produced the Poike tablet
, a crude imitation of rongorongo, so the Ana o Keke petroglyphs may also not be authentic.
, a lay friar of the Congrégation de Picpus
, landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from Valparaíso
. He was to remain on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing its inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay in which he reports his discovery of the tablets that year:
There is no other mention of the tablets in his report, and the discovery went unnoticed. Eyraud left Easter Island on October 11, in extremely poor health. Made a fully fledged priest in 1865, he returned to Easter Island in 1866 where he died of tuberculosis in August 1868, aged 48.
, received a gift from the recent Catholic converts of Easter Island. It was a long cord of human hair, a fishing line perhaps, wound around a small wooden board covered in hieroglyphic writing. Stunned at the discovery, he wrote to Father Hippolyte Roussel
on Easter Island to collect all the tablets and to find natives capable of translating them. But Roussel could only recover a few, and the islanders could not agree on how to read them.
Yet Eyraud had seen hundreds of tablets only four years earlier. What happened to the missing tablets is a matter of conjecture. Eyraud had noted how little interest their owners had in them. Stéphen Chauvet
reports that,
Orliac has observed that the deep black indention, about 10 cm long, on lines 5 and 6 of the recto of tablet H
is a groove made by the rubbing of a fire stick, showing that tablet H had been used for fire-making. Tablets S and P had been cut into lashed planking for a canoe, which fits the story of a man named Niari who made a canoe out of abandoned tablets.
As European-introduced diseases and raids by Peruvian slavers, including a final devastating raid in 1862 and a subsequent smallpox epidemic, had reduced the Rapa Nui population to under two hundred by the 1870s, it is possible that literacy had been wiped out by the time Eyraud discovered the tablets in 1866.
Thus in 1868 Jaussen could recover only a few tablets, with three more acquired by Captain Gana of the Chilean corvette O'Higgins in 1870. In the 1950s Barthel found the decayed remains of half a dozen tablets in caves, in the context of burials. However, no glyphs could be salvaged.
Of the 26 commonly accepted texts that survive, only half are in good condition and authentic beyond doubt.
undertook a 1914–1915 scientific expedition to Rapa Nui with her husband to catalog the art, customs, and writing of the island. She was able to interview two elderly informants, Kapiera and a leper named Tomenika, who allegedly had some knowledge of rongorongo. The sessions were not very fruitful, as the two often contradicted each other. From them Routledge concluded that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device that did not directly represent language, in other words, proto-writing, and that the meanings of the glyphs were reformulated by each scribe, so that the kohau rongorongo could not be read by someone not trained in that specific text. The texts themselves she believed to be litanies for priest-scribes, kept apart in special houses and strictly tapu, that recorded the island's history and mythology. By the time of later ethnographic accounts, such as Métraux (1940), much of what Routledge recorded in her notes had been forgotten, and the oral history showed a strong external influence from popular published accounts.
pectoral ornaments worn by the elite; X, inscribed on various parts of a tangata manu
("birdman") statuette; and Y, a European snuff box assembled from sections cut from a rongorongo tablet. The tablets, like the pectorals, statuettes, and staves, were works of art and valued possessions, and were apparently given individual proper names in the same manner as jade ornaments in New Zealand. Two of the tablets, C and S, have a documented pre-missionary provenance
, though others may be as old or older. There are in addition a few isolated glyphs or short sequences which might prove to be rongorongo.
Crude glyphs have been found on a few stone objects and some additional wooden items, but most of these are thought to be fakes created for the early tourism market. Several of the 26 wooden texts are suspect due to uncertain provenance (X, Y, and Z), poor quality craftsmanship (F, K, V, W, Y, and Z), or to having been carved with a steel blade (K, V, and Y), and thus, although they may prove to be genuine, should not be trusted in initial attempts at decipherment. Z resembles many early forgeries in not being boustrophedon, but it may be a palimpsest
on an authentic but now illegible text.
, on the crown of a mo‘ai pakapaka statuette. Many human skulls are inscribed with the single 'fish' glyph 700 , which may stand for îka "war casualty". There are other designs, including some tattoos recorded by early visitors, which are possibly single rongorongo glyphs, but since they are isolated and pictographic, it is difficult to know whether or not they are actually writing.
s (variants). In the case of allography, the simple numeric code was assigned to what Barthel believed to be the basic form (Grundtypus), while variants were specified by alphabetic affixes. He assigned 600 numeric codes. The hundreds place is a numeral from 0 to 7, and categorizes the head, or overall form if there is no head: 0 and 1 for geometric shapes and inanimate objects; 2 for figures with "ears"; 3 and 4 for figures with open mouths (they are differentiated by their legs/tails); 5 for figures with miscellaneous heads; 6 for figures with beaks; and 7 for fish, arthropods, etc. The tens and units numerals were used similarly, so that for example glyphs 206, 306, 406, 506, and 606 all have a downward pointing wing or arm on the left and a raised four-fingered hand on the right:
There is some arbitrariness to which glyphs are grouped together, and there are inconsistencies in the assignments of numerical codes and the use of affixes which make the system rather complex. However, despite its shortcomings, Barthel's is the only effective system ever proposed to categorize rongorongo glyphs.
Barthel (1971) claimed to have parsed the inventory of glyphs to 120, of which the other 480 are allographs or ligatures. The evidence was never published, but similar figures have been obtained by other scholars, such as Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov (2007).
, Rudolf Philippi, published the Santiago Staff, and Carroll (1892) published part of the Oar. Most texts remained beyond the reach of would-be decipherers until 1958, when Thomas Barthel published line drawings of almost all the known corpus in his Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift ("Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island script") which remains the fundamental reference to rongorongo. He transcribed texts A through X, over 99% of the corpus; the CEIPP
estimates that it is 97% accurate. Barthel's line drawings were not produced free-hand but copied from rubbing
s, which helped ensure their faithfulness to the originals.
Fischer (1997) published new line drawings. These include lines scored with obsidian but not finished with a shark tooth which had not been recorded by Barthel because the rubbings he used often did not show them, for example on tablet N. (However, in line Gv4 shown in the section on writing instruments above, the light lines were recorded by both Fischer and Barthel.) There are other omissions, such as a sequence of glyphs at the transition from line Ca6 to Ca7 which is missing from Barthel, presumably because the carving went over the side of the tablet and was missed by Barthel's rubbing. (This is right in the middle of Barthel's calendar.) However, other discrepancies between the two records are straightforward contradictions. For instance, the initial glyph of I12 (line 12 of the Santiago Staff) in Fischer does not correspond with that of Barthel or Philippi, which agree with each other, and Barthel's rubbing (below) is incompatible with Fischer's drawing. Barthel's annotation, Original doch 53.76! ("original indeed 53.76!"), suggests that he specifically verified Philippi's reading:
In addition, the next glyph (glyph 20, a "spindle with three knobs") is missing its right-side "sprout" (glyph 10) in Philippi's drawing. This may be the result of an error in the inking, since there is a blank space in its place. The corpus is thus tainted with quite some uncertainty. It has never been properly checked for want of high-quality photographs.
, none of the texts are understood. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment, assuming rongorongo is truly writing: the small number of remaining texts, the lack of context such as illustrations in which to interpret them, and the poor attestation of the Old Rapanui language since modern Rapanui is heavily mixed with Tahitian
and is therefore unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets.
The prevailing opinion is that rongorongo is not true writing but proto-writing, or even a more limited mnemonic
device for genealogy, choreography, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture. For example, the Atlas of Languages states, "It was probably used as a memory aid or for decorative purposes, not for recording the Rapanui language of the islanders." If this is the case, then there is little hope of ever deciphering it. For those who believe it to be writing, there is debate as to whether rongorongo is essentially logographic or syllabic
, though it appears to be compatible with neither a pure logography nor a pure syllabary.
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island
Easter Island
Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people...
that appears to be writing
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not...
and what might prove to be genealogical
Genealogy
Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members...
information has been identified, not even these glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing, it could be one of as few as three or four independent inventions of writing in human history.
Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a bird-man
Tangata manu
The Tangata manu , was the winner of a traditional competition on Rapa Nui . The ritual was an annual competition to collect the first Sooty Tern egg of the season from the islet of Motu Nui, swim back to Rapa Nui and climb the sea cliff of Rano Kau to the clifftop village of Orongo.-Myth:In the...
statuette, and two reimiro
Reimiro
A reimiro is a decorative crescent-shaped pectoral ornament once worn by the women of Easter Island. The name comes from the Rapanui rei 'stern' or 'prow' and miro 'boat'. Thus the crescent represents a Polynesian canoe....
ornaments. There are also a few petroglyph
Petroglyph
Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred.
Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon
Boustrophedon
Boustrophedon , is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in...
. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting
Fluting (architecture)
Fluting in architecture refers to the shallow grooves running vertically along a surface.It typically refers to the grooves running on a column shaft or a pilaster, but need not necessarily be restricted to those two applications...
carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact
Cultural artifact
A cultural artifact is a term used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, and sociology for anything created by humans which gives information about the culture of its creator and users...
and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as and have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing ears or eyes.
Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The somewhat variable names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.
Etymology and variant names
Rongorongo is the modern name for the inscriptions. In the Rapanui languageRapa Nui language
Rapa Nui , also known as Pascuan or Pascuense, is an Eastern Polynesian language spoken on the island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island....
it means "to recite, to declaim, to chant out".
The original name—or perhaps description—of the script is said to have been kohau motu mo rongorongo, "lines incised for chanting out", shortened to kohau rongorongo or "lines [for] chanting out". There are also said to have been more specific names for the texts based on their topic. For example, the kohau ta‘u ("lines of years") were annals, the kohau îka ("lines of fishes") were lists of persons killed in war (îka "fish" was homophonous with or used figuratively for "war casualty"), and the kohau ranga "lines of fugitives" were lists of war refugees.
Some authors have understood the ta‘u in kohau ta‘u to refer to a separate form of writing distinct from rongorongo. Barthel recorded that, "The Islanders had another writing (the so-called 'ta‘u script') which recorded their annals and other secular matters, but this has disappeared." However, Fischer writes that "the ta‘u was originally a type of rongorongo inscription. In the 1880s, a group of elders invented a derivative 'script' [also] called ta‘u with which to decorate carvings in order to increase their trading value. It is a primitive imitation of rongorongo." An alleged third script, the mama or va‘eva‘e described in some mid-twentieth-century publications, was "an early twentieth-century geometric [decorative] invention".
Form and construction
Fluting (architecture)
Fluting in architecture refers to the shallow grooves running vertically along a surface.It typically refers to the grooves running on a column shaft or a pilaster, but need not necessarily be restricted to those two applications...
(tablets B, E, G, H, O, Q, and possibly T), with the glyphs carved in shallow channels running the length of the tablets, as can be seen in the image of tablet G at right. It is thought that irregular and often blemished pieces of wood were used in their entirety rather than squared off due to the scarcity of wood on the island.
Writing media
Toromiro
Sophora toromiro, commonly known as Toromiro, is a species of flowering tree in the legume family, Fabaceae, that is endemic to Easter Island. Heavy deforestation had eliminated most of the island's forests by the first half of the 17th century , and the once common toromiro became rare and...
wood. However, Orliac (2005) examined seven objects (tablets B, C, G, H, K, Q, and reimiro L) with stereo optical
Comparison microscope
A comparison microscope is a device used to analyze side-by-side specimens. It consists of two microscopes connected by an optical bridge, which results in a split view window enabling two separate objects to be viewed simultaneously...
and scanning electron microscope
Scanning electron microscope
A scanning electron microscope is a type of electron microscope that images a sample by scanning it with a high-energy beam of electrons in a raster scan pattern...
s and determined that all were instead made from Pacific rosewood (Thespesia populnea); the same identification had been made for tablet M in 1934. This 15-meter tree, known as "Pacific rosewood" for its color and called mako‘i in Rapanui, is used for sacred groves and carvings throughout eastern Polynesia and was evidently brought to Easter Island by the first settlers. However, not all the wood was native: Orliac (2007) established that tablets N, P, and S were made of South African Yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius)
Podocarpus latifolius
Podocarpus latifolius is a large evergreen tree up to 35 m high and 3 m trunk diameter, in the conifer family Podocarpaceae; it is the type species of the genus Podocarpus....
and therefore that the wood had arrived with Western contact. Fischer describes P as "a damaged and reshapen European or American oar", as are A (which is European ash, Fraxinus excelsior) and V; says that wood from the wreck of a Western boat was said to have been used for many tablets; and that both P and S had been recycled as planking for a Rapanui driftwood canoe. Several texts, including O, are carved on gnarled driftwood
Driftwood
Driftwood is wood that has been washed onto a shore or beach of a sea or river by the action of winds, tides, waves or man. It is a form of marine debris or tidewrack....
. The fact that the islanders were reduced to inscribing driftwood, and were regardless extremely economical in their use of wood, may have had consequences for the structure of the script, such as the abundance of ligatures and potentially a telegraphic style of writing that would complicate textual analysis.
Thomas Barthel
Thomas Sylvester Barthel was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island....
believed that carving on wood was a secondary development in the evolution of the script based on an earlier stage of incising banana leaves or the sheaths of the banana trunk with a bone stylus, and that the medium of leaves was retained not only for lessons but to plan and compose the texts of the wooden tablets. He found experimentally that the glyphs were quite visible on banana leaves due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. However, when the leaves themselves dried they became brittle and would not have survived for long.
Barthel speculated that the banana leaf might even have served as a prototype for the tablets, with the fluted surface of the tablets an emulation of the veined structure of a leaf:
Direction of writing
Rongorongo glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedonBoustrophedon
Boustrophedon , is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in...
, left to right and bottom to top. That is, the reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line. When reading one line, the lines above and below it would appear upside down, as can be seen in the image at left.
However, the writing continues onto the second side of a tablet at the point where it finishes off the first, so if the first side has an odd number of lines, as is the case with tablets K, N, P, and Q, the second will start at the upper left-hand corner, and the direction of writing shifts to top to bottom.
Larger tablets and staves may have been read without turning, if the reader were able to read upside-down.
Writing instruments
Shark tooth
A shark tooth is one of the numerous teeth of a shark. Sharks continually shed their teeth, and some Carcharhiniformes shed approximately 35,000 teeth in a lifetime. In some geological formations, shark's teeth are a common fossil...
, presumably the hafted
Hilt
The hilt of a sword is its handle, consisting of a guard,grip and pommel. The guard may contain a crossguard or quillons. A ricasso may also be present, but this is rarely the case...
tools still used to carve wood in Polynesia, to flute and polish the tablets and then to incise the glyphs. (See shark tooth tools.) The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though superficial hair-line cuts are also found. In the closeup image at right, a glyph is composed of two parts connected by a hair-line cut; this is a typical convention for this shape. Several researchers, including Barthel, believe that these superficial cuts were made by obsidian, and that the texts were carved in a two-stage process, first sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a worn shark tooth. The remaining hair-line cuts were then either errors, design conventions (as at right), or decorative embellishments. Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hair-line cuts, as can be seen repeatedly in the closeup of one end of tablet B below. However, Barthel was also told that the last literate Rapanui king, Nga‘ara
King Nga'ara
Nga‘araThe name Nga‘ara has been variously spelled Gnaara, Gaara, Ngaara, Nga-Ara, Gahara, and Gobara. The letter g is a common convention in the Pacific for the ng-sound , and Roussel, the one who transcribed the name as Gahara, frequently used h for glottal stop...
, sketched out the glyphs in soot with a fish bone and then engraved them with a shark tooth.
Tablet N
Rongorongo text N
Text N of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Vienna and therefore also known as the Small Vienna tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and repeats much of the verso of tablet E.-Other names:...
, on the other hand, shows no sign of shark teeth. Haberlandt noticed that the glyphs of this text appear to have been incised with a sharpened bone, as evidenced by the shallowness and width of the grooves. N also "displays secondary working with obsidian flakes to elaborate details within the finished contour lines. No other rongo-rongo inscription reveals such graphic extravagance".
Other tablets appear to have been cut with a steel blade, often rather crudely. Although steel knives were available after the arrival of the Spanish, this does cast suspicion on the authenticity of these tablets.
Glyphs
Sea turtle
Sea turtles are marine reptiles that inhabit all of the world's oceans except the Arctic.-Distribution:...
glyph below, and more clearly on sea-turtle petroglyphs) but which often resemble ears (as on the anthropomorphic petroglyph in the next section). Birds are common; many resemble the frigatebird
Frigatebird
The frigatebirds are a family, Fregatidae, of seabirds. There are five species in the single genus Fregata. They are also sometimes called Man of War birds or Pirate birds. Since they are related to the pelicans, the term "frigate pelican" is also a name applied to them...
(see image directly below) which was associated with the supreme god Makemake
Makemake (mythology)
Makemake in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island, was the creator of humanity, the god of fertility and the chief god of the "Tangata manu" or bird-man cult .He is a frequent subject of the island's Petroglyphs.-In Astronomy:The trans-Neptunian...
. Other glyphs look like fish or arthropods. A few, but only a few, are similar to petroglyphs found throughout the island.
- Some of the more iconic rongorongo glyphs. The seated man [bottom left] is thought to be a compound.
- (Readings from Barthel (1958). The captions in the right-most column are merely descriptive.)
Origin
Oral tradition holds that either Hotu Matu‘aHotu Matu'a
Hotu Matu'a was the legendary first settler and ariki mau of Easter Island. Hotu Matu'a and his two canoe colonising party were Polynesians from the now unknown land of Hiva...
or Tu‘u ko Iho, the legendary founder(s) of Rapa Nui, brought 67 tablets from their homeland. The same founder is also credited with bringing indigenous plants such as the toromiro
Toromiro
Sophora toromiro, commonly known as Toromiro, is a species of flowering tree in the legume family, Fabaceae, that is endemic to Easter Island. Heavy deforestation had eliminated most of the island's forests by the first half of the 17th century , and the once common toromiro became rare and...
. However, there is no homeland likely to have had a tradition of writing in Polynesia or even in South America. Thus rongorongo appears to have been an internal development. Given that few if any of the Rapanui people remaining on the island in the 1870s could read the glyphs, it is likely that only a small minority were ever literate. Indeed, early visitors were told that literacy was a privilege of the ruling families and priests who were all kidnapped in the Peruvian slaving raids or died soon afterwards in the resulting epidemics.
Dating the tablets
Little direct dating has been done. Tablet QRongorongo text Q
Text Q of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Small St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'....
(Small Saint Petersburg) is the sole item that has been carbon dated
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. Raw, i.e. uncalibrated, radiocarbon ages are usually reported in radiocarbon years "Before Present" ,...
but the results only constrain the date to sometime after 1680.
Direct dating is not the only evidence. Texts A, P, and V can be dated to the 18th or 19th century by virtue of being inscribed on European oars. Orliac (2005) calculated that the wood for tablet C
Rongorongo text C
Text C of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Mamari, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It contains the Mamari Calendar.-Other names:C is the standard designation, from Barthel...
(Mamari) was cut from the trunk of a tree some 15 metres (49.2 ft) tall, and Easter Island has long been deforested of trees that size. Analysis of charcoal indicates that the forest disappeared in the first half of the 17th century. Roggeveen
Jakob Roggeveen
Jacob Roggeveen was a Dutch explorer who was sent to find Terra Australis, but he instead came across Easter Island...
, who discovered Easter Island in 1722, described the island as "destitute of large trees" and in 1770 González de Ahedo
Felipe González de Ahedo
Felipe González de Ahedo, also spelled Phelipe González y Haedo , was a Spanish navigator and cartographer known for annexing Easter Island in 1770....
wrote, "Not a single tree is to be found capable of furnishing a plank so much as six inches [15 cm] in width." Forster, with Cook's
James Cook
Captain James Cook, FRS, RN was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy...
expedition of 1774, reported that "there was not a tree upon the island which exceeded the height of 10 feet [3 m]."
All of these methods date the wood, not the inscription. However, Pacific rosewood is not durable, and is unlikely to survive long in Easter Island's climate. On the other hand, glyph 67 (
Paschalococos
Paschalococos disperta , formerly Jubaea disperta, was the native cocoid palm species of Easter Island...
, which seems to have disappeared from the island's pollen record
Palynology
Palynology is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, orbicules, dinoflagellate cysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and scolecodonts, together with particulate organic matter and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments...
circa 1650, suggesting that the script itself is at least that old. The start of forest clearing for agriculture, and thus presumably colonization, has been dated to circa 1200, implying a date for the invention of rongorongo no earlier than the 13th century.
1770 Spanish expedition
In 1770 the Spanish annexed Easter Island under Captain González de AhedoFelipe González de Ahedo
Felipe González de Ahedo, also spelled Phelipe González y Haedo , was a Spanish navigator and cartographer known for annexing Easter Island in 1770....
. A signing ceremony was held in which a treaty of annexation was signed by an undisclosed number of chiefs "by marking upon it certain characters in their own form of script." (Reproduction at right)
Several scholars have suggested that rongorongo may have been a invention inspired by this visit and the signing of the treaty of annexation. As circumstantial evidence, they note that no explorer reported the script prior to Eugène Eyraud
Eugène Eyraud
Eugène Eyraud was a lay friar of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and the first Westerner to live on Easter Island.- Early life :...
in 1864, and are of the opinion that the marks with which the chiefs signed the Spanish treaty do not resemble rongorongo.
The hypothesis of these researchers is not that rongorongo was itself a copy of the Latin alphabet, or of any other form of writing, but that the concept of writing had been conveyed in a process anthropologists term trans-cultural diffusion, which then inspired the islanders to invent their own system of writing. If this is the case, then rongorongo emerged, flourished, fell into oblivion, and was all but forgotten within a span of less than a hundred years. However, known cases of the diffusion of writing, such as Sequoyah
Sequoyah
Sequoyah , named in English George Gist or George Guess, was a Cherokee silversmith. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible...
's invention of the Cherokee syllabary
Cherokee syllabary
The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language in the late 1810s and early 1820s. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed...
after seeing the power of English-language newspapers, or Uyaquk
Uyaquk
Uyaquq was a Yupik Moravian missionary and linguistic genius who went from being an illiterate adult to inventing a series of writing systems for his native language and then producing translations of the Bible and other religious works in a period of five years.Uyaquk was born in into a family of...
's invention of the Yugtun script
Yugtun script
The Yugtun or Alaska script is a syllabary invented around the year 1900 by Uyaquk to write the Yugtun dialect of Central Alaskan Yup'ik. Uyaquk, who was monolingual in Yup'ik, initially used indigenous pictograms as a form of proto-writing that served as a mnemonic in preaching the Bible...
inspired by readings from Christian scripture, involved greater contact than the signing of a single treaty. In addition, the glyphs could easily be crudely written rongorongo, as might be expected for Rapa Nui representatives writing with the novel instrument of pen on paper. The fact that the script was not otherwise observed by early explorers, who spent little time on the island, may simply reflect that it was taboo at the time; such taboos may have lost power along with the tangata rongorongo (scribes) by the time Rapanui society collapsed following European slaving raids and the resulting epidemics, so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day. As Orliac pointed out, Tablet C would appear to predate the Spanish visit by at least a century.
Petroglyphs
Petroglyph
Petroglyphs are pictogram and logogram images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, and abrading. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images...
s in Polynesia. Nearly every suitable surface has been carved, including the stone walls of some houses and a few of the famous mo‘ai
Moai
Moai , or mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved from rock on the Chilean Polynesian island of Easter Island between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the...
statues and their fallen topknots. Around one thousand sites with over four thousand glyphs have been catalogued, some in bas- or sunken-relief, and some painted red and white. Designs include a concentration of chimeric
Chimera (mythology)
The Chimera or Chimaera was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing female creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lioness with a tail that ended in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her...
bird-man figures at Orongo
Orongo
‘Orongo is a stone village and ceremonial centre at the southwestern tip of Rapa Nui . The first half of the ceremonial village's 53 stone masonry houses were investigated and restored in 1974 by American archaeologist William Mulloy...
, a ceremonial center of the tangata manu
Tangata manu
The Tangata manu , was the winner of a traditional competition on Rapa Nui . The ritual was an annual competition to collect the first Sooty Tern egg of the season from the islet of Motu Nui, swim back to Rapa Nui and climb the sea cliff of Rano Kau to the clifftop village of Orongo.-Myth:In the...
("bird-man") cult; faces of the creation deity Makemake
Makemake (mythology)
Makemake in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island, was the creator of humanity, the god of fertility and the chief god of the "Tangata manu" or bird-man cult .He is a frequent subject of the island's Petroglyphs.-In Astronomy:The trans-Neptunian...
; marine animals like turtles, tuna, swordfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, crabs, and octopus (some with human faces); roosters; canoes, and over five hundred komari (vulvas). Petroglyphs are often accompanied by carved divots ("cupules") in the rock. Changing traditions are preserved in bas-relief birdmen, which were carved over simpler outline forms and in turn carved over with komari. Although the petroglyphs cannot be directly dated, some are partially obscured by pre-colonial stone buildings, suggesting they are relatively old.
Several of the anthropomorphic and animal-form petroglyphs have parallels in rongorongo, for instance a double-headed frigatebird
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
s (Macri 1995), but not old enough to have been incorporated into the petroglyphic tradition. The most complex candidate for petroglyphic rongorongo is what appears to be a short sequence of glyphs, one of which is a ligature, carved on the wall of a cave. However, the sequence does not appear to have been carved in a single hand (see image at right), and the cave is located near the house that produced the Poike tablet
Rongorongo text Z
Text Z of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Poike, may be one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:Z is the standard designation, continuing from Barthel . Fischer numbers it among the imitative pieces made for tourists as T4.-Location:Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago...
, a crude imitation of rongorongo, so the Ana o Keke petroglyphs may also not be authentic.
Discovery
Eugène EyraudEugène Eyraud
Eugène Eyraud was a lay friar of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and the first Westerner to live on Easter Island.- Early life :...
, a lay friar of the Congrégation de Picpus
Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar is a Roman Catholic religious order of brothers, priests, and nuns...
, landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from Valparaíso
Valparaíso
Valparaíso is a city and commune of Chile, center of its third largest conurbation and one of the country's most important seaports and an increasing cultural center in the Southwest Pacific hemisphere. The city is the capital of the Valparaíso Province and the Valparaíso Region...
. He was to remain on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing its inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay in which he reports his discovery of the tablets that year:
There is no other mention of the tablets in his report, and the discovery went unnoticed. Eyraud left Easter Island on October 11, in extremely poor health. Made a fully fledged priest in 1865, he returned to Easter Island in 1866 where he died of tuberculosis in August 1868, aged 48.
Destruction
In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne "Tepano" JaussenFlorentin-Étienne Jaussen
Monsignor Florentin-Étienne Jaussen was the first bishop of Tahiti and the man who brought the rongorongo script of Easter Island to the world's attention. In the 1860s Bishop Jaussen was responsible for ending the slave raids on Easter Island.Jaussen was born in Rocles, France...
, received a gift from the recent Catholic converts of Easter Island. It was a long cord of human hair, a fishing line perhaps, wound around a small wooden board covered in hieroglyphic writing. Stunned at the discovery, he wrote to Father Hippolyte Roussel
Hippolyte Roussel
Hippolyte Roussel was a French priest and missionary to Polynesia, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.In 1854 he was sent to evangelize in the Tuamotus and Mangareva in the Gambier Islands...
on Easter Island to collect all the tablets and to find natives capable of translating them. But Roussel could only recover a few, and the islanders could not agree on how to read them.
Yet Eyraud had seen hundreds of tablets only four years earlier. What happened to the missing tablets is a matter of conjecture. Eyraud had noted how little interest their owners had in them. Stéphen Chauvet
Stéphen Chauvet
Stéphen-Charles Chauvet , more commonly known as Dr Stéphen Chauvet, was the author of the first illustrated compendium of information about Easter Island, L'Île de Pâques et ses mystères, published in Paris in 1935....
reports that,
Orliac has observed that the deep black indention, about 10 cm long, on lines 5 and 6 of the recto of tablet H
Rongorongo text H
Text H of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Great or Large Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:H is the standard designation, from...
is a groove made by the rubbing of a fire stick, showing that tablet H had been used for fire-making. Tablets S and P had been cut into lashed planking for a canoe, which fits the story of a man named Niari who made a canoe out of abandoned tablets.
As European-introduced diseases and raids by Peruvian slavers, including a final devastating raid in 1862 and a subsequent smallpox epidemic, had reduced the Rapa Nui population to under two hundred by the 1870s, it is possible that literacy had been wiped out by the time Eyraud discovered the tablets in 1866.
Thus in 1868 Jaussen could recover only a few tablets, with three more acquired by Captain Gana of the Chilean corvette O'Higgins in 1870. In the 1950s Barthel found the decayed remains of half a dozen tablets in caves, in the context of burials. However, no glyphs could be salvaged.
Of the 26 commonly accepted texts that survive, only half are in good condition and authentic beyond doubt.
Anthropological accounts
British archaeologist and anthropologist Katherine RoutledgeKatherine Routledge
Katherine Maria Routledge, née Pease was a British archaeologist who initiated the first true survey of Easter Island....
undertook a 1914–1915 scientific expedition to Rapa Nui with her husband to catalog the art, customs, and writing of the island. She was able to interview two elderly informants, Kapiera and a leper named Tomenika, who allegedly had some knowledge of rongorongo. The sessions were not very fruitful, as the two often contradicted each other. From them Routledge concluded that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device that did not directly represent language, in other words, proto-writing, and that the meanings of the glyphs were reformulated by each scribe, so that the kohau rongorongo could not be read by someone not trained in that specific text. The texts themselves she believed to be litanies for priest-scribes, kept apart in special houses and strictly tapu, that recorded the island's history and mythology. By the time of later ethnographic accounts, such as Métraux (1940), much of what Routledge recorded in her notes had been forgotten, and the oral history showed a strong external influence from popular published accounts.
Corpus
The 26 rongorongo texts with letter codes are inscribed on wooden objects, each with between 2 and 2320 simple glyphs and components of compound glyphs, for over 15,000 in all. The objects are mostly oblong wooden tablets, with the exceptions of I, a possibly sacred chieftain's staff known as the Santiago Staff; J and L, inscribed on reimiroReimiro
A reimiro is a decorative crescent-shaped pectoral ornament once worn by the women of Easter Island. The name comes from the Rapanui rei 'stern' or 'prow' and miro 'boat'. Thus the crescent represents a Polynesian canoe....
pectoral ornaments worn by the elite; X, inscribed on various parts of a tangata manu
Tangata manu
The Tangata manu , was the winner of a traditional competition on Rapa Nui . The ritual was an annual competition to collect the first Sooty Tern egg of the season from the islet of Motu Nui, swim back to Rapa Nui and climb the sea cliff of Rano Kau to the clifftop village of Orongo.-Myth:In the...
("birdman") statuette; and Y, a European snuff box assembled from sections cut from a rongorongo tablet. The tablets, like the pectorals, statuettes, and staves, were works of art and valued possessions, and were apparently given individual proper names in the same manner as jade ornaments in New Zealand. Two of the tablets, C and S, have a documented pre-missionary provenance
Provenance
Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...
, though others may be as old or older. There are in addition a few isolated glyphs or short sequences which might prove to be rongorongo.
Classic texts
Barthel referred to each of 24 texts he accepted as genuine with a letter of the alphabet; two texts have been added to the corpus since then. The two faces of the tablets are distinguished by suffixing r (recto) or v (verso) when the reading sequence can be ascertained, to which the line being discussed is appended. Thus Pr2 is item P (the Great Saint Petersburg Tablet), recto, second line. When the reading sequence cannot be ascertained, a and b are used for the faces. Thus Ab1 is item A (Tahua), side b, first line. The six sides of the Snuff Box are lettered as sides a to f. Nearly all publications follow the Barthel convention, though a popular book by Fischer uses an idiosyncratic numbering system.| Barthel code | Fischer code | Nickname / Description | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | RR1 | Tahua Rongorongo text A Text A of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Tahua, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:A is the standard designation, from Barthel... (the Oar) |
Rome Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar is a Roman Catholic religious order of brothers, priests, and nuns... |
1825 glyphs inscribed on a 91-cm European or American oar blade. Ash wood. |
| B | RR4 | Aruku kurenga Rongorongo text B Text B of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Aruku Kurenga, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.Aruku Kurenga provided part of the "Jaussen List", a failed key of rongorongo glyphs... |
1135 glyphs on a 41-cm fluted rosewood Portia tree Thespesia populnea, commonly known as the Portia Tree , is species of flowering plant in the mallow family, Malvaceae. It is a small tree or arborescent shrub that has a pantropical distribution, found on coasts around the world. However, the Portia Tree is probably native only to the Old World,... tablet. |
|
| C | RR2 | Mamari Rongorongo text C Text C of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Mamari, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It contains the Mamari Calendar.-Other names:C is the standard designation, from Barthel... |
1000 glyphs on a 29-cm unfluted rosewood tablet. Contains calendrical information; more pictographic than other texts. | |
| D | RR3 | Echancrée Rongorongo text D Text D of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Échancrée , is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. This is the tablet that started Jaussen's collection.-Other names:D is the standard designation, from Barthel... |
Pape‘ete Musée de Tahiti et des Îles The Musée de Tahiti et des Îles , Tahitian Te Fare Manaha , is a Polynesian ethnographic museum in the village of Punaauia on Tahiti.... |
270 glyphs on a 30-cm unfluted notched tablet. The tablet first given to Jaussen, as a spool for a cord of hair. The two sides are written in different hands. Yellowwood Podocarpus latifolius Podocarpus latifolius is a large evergreen tree up to 35 m high and 3 m trunk diameter, in the conifer family Podocarpaceae; it is the type species of the genus Podocarpus.... ? |
| E | RR6 | Keiti Rongorongo text E Text E of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Keiti, is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.-Other names:E is the standard designation, from Barthel... |
(Leuven Catholic University of Leuven The Catholic University of Leuven, or of Louvain, was the largest, oldest and most prominent university in Belgium. The university was founded in 1425 as the University of Leuven by John IV, Duke of Brabant and approved by a Papal bull by Pope Martin V.During France's occupation of Belgium in the... ) |
822 glyphs on a 39-cm fluted tablet. Destroyed by fire in WWI. |
| F | RR7 | Chauvet fragment Rongorongo text F Text F of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the Chauvet tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:F is the standard designation, from Barthel... |
New York | A 12-cm fragment with 51 recorded crudely executed glyphs. (Some glyphs are covered by a label.) Palm wood? |
| G | RR8 | Small Santiago Rongorongo text G Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:... |
Santiago National Museum of Natural History in Chile The Chilean National Museum of Natural History is one of three national museums in Chile, along with the Museum of Fine Arts and the National History Museum. It is located in Quinta Normal.-History:... |
720 glyphs on a 32-cm fluted rosewood tablet. The verso may include a genealogy and does not resemble the patterns of other texts. |
| H | RR9 | Large Santiago Rongorongo text H Text H of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Great or Large Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:H is the standard designation, from... |
1580 glyphs on a 44-cm fluted rosewood tablet. Nearly duplicates P and Q. | |
| I | RR10 | Santiago staff Rongorongo text I Text I of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the Santiago Staff, is the longest of the two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. Statistical analysis suggests that its contents are distinct.-Other names:... |
2920 glyphs inscribed on a 126-cm chief's staff. The longest text, and the only one which appears to have punctuation. Among the patterns of the other texts, it resembles only Gv and Ta. | |
| J | RR20 | Large reimiro Rongorongo text J Text J of the rongorongo corpus, also known as reimiro 1, is the larger of two inscribed reimiro in London and one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:J is the standard designation, from Barthel... |
London British Museum The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its... |
A 73-cm breast ornament decorated with 2 glyphs. May be old. |
| K | RR19 | London Rongorongo text K Text K of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the London tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and nearly duplicates the recto of tablet G.-Other names:... |
163 crudely executed glyphs paraphrasing Gr on a 22-cm rosewood tablet. | |
| L | RR21 | Small reimiro Rongorongo text L Text L of the rongorongo corpus, also known as reimiro 2, is the smaller of two inscribed reimiro in London and one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
A 41-cm breast ornament decorated with a line of 44 glyphs. May be old. Rosewood. | |
| M | RR24 | Large Vienna Rongorongo text M Text M of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in Vienna and therefore also known as the Large or Great Vienna tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
Vienna Vienna Museum of Ethnology thumb|The Museum of Ethnolog is housed in a wing of the [[Hofburg Imperial Palace]].thumb|InteriorThe Museum of Ethnology in Vienna is the largest anthropological museum in Austria, established in 1876. It currently resides in the Hofburg Imperial Palace and houses a quarter million ethnographical... |
A 28-cm rosewood tablet in poor condition. Side b is destroyed; 54 glyphs are visible on side a. An early cast preserves more of the text. |
| N | RR23 | Small Vienna Rongorongo text N Text N of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Vienna and therefore also known as the Small Vienna tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and repeats much of the verso of tablet E.-Other names:... |
172 intricately carved glyphs, loosely paraphrasing Ev, on a 26-cm piece of yellowwood. | |
| O | RR22 | Berlin Rongorongo text O Text O of the rongorongo corpus, the Berlin tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:O is the standard designation, from Barthel . Fischer refers to it as RR22.... |
Berlin Ethnological Museum of Berlin The Ethnological Museum in Berlin is one of the largest ethnological museums in the world. It houses half a million pre-industrial objects, acquired primarily from the German voyages of exploration and colonialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries... |
103-cm piece of fluted driftwood with 90 legible glyphs on side a. In poor condition, none of the glyphs on side b can be identified. |
| P | RR18 | Large St Petersburg Rongorongo text P Text P of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Great or Large St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.-Other names:P is the standard designation,... |
St. Petersburg | 1163 glyphs inscribed on a 63-cm European or American oar blade. Yellowwood. Had been used for planking. Nearly duplicates H and Q. |
| Q | RR17 | Small St Petersburg Rongorongo text Q Text Q of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in St Petersburg and therefore also known as the Small St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called 'Great Tradition'.... |
718 glyphs on a 44-cm fluted rosewood tree trunk. Nearly duplicates H and P. A closeup of Qr3–7 is shown in the infobox. | |
| R | RR15 | Small Washington Rongorongo text R Text R of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Small Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
Washington National Museum of Natural History The National Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. Admission is free and the museum is open 364 days a year.... |
357 glyphs, nearly all in phrases repeated on other texts, on a 24-cm piece. |
| S | RR16 | Large Washington Rongorongo text S Text S of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Great or Large Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
600 legible glyphs on a 63-cm piece of yellowwood. Later cut for planking. | |
| T | RR11 | Fluted Honolulu Rongorongo text T Text T of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Honolulu tablet 1 or Honolulu 3629, is the only fluted tablet in the Honolulu collection and one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
Honolulu | 120 legible glyphs on a 31-cm fluted tablet. In poor condition, side b is illegible. |
| U | RR12 | Honolulu beam Rongorongo text U Text U of the rongorongo corpus, carved on a beam, also known as Honolulu tablet 2 or Honolulu 3628, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
27 legible glyphs on a 70-cm European or American beam. In poor condition. The two sides are written in different hands. | |
| V | RR13 | Honolulu oar Rongorongo text V Text V of the rongorongo corpus, the Honolulu oar, also known as Honolulu tablet 3 or Honolulu 3622, may be one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
22 legible glyphs on a 72-cm European or American oar blade. In poor condition. One line of text, plus a separate pair of glyphs, on side a; traces of text on side b. | |
| W | RR14 | Honolulu fragment Rongorongo text W The fragmentary text W of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Honolulu tablet 4 or Honolulu 445, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:... |
A 7-cm fragment with 8 glyphs on the one side that has been described. | |
| X | RR25 | Tangata manu Rongorongo text X Text X of the rongorongo corpus, known as the Birdman, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:X is the standard designation, from Barthel . Fischer refers to it as RR25.-Location:... (New York birdman) |
New York American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world... |
A 33-cm birdman statuette with 37 superficially inscribed glyphs separated in seven short scattered texts. |
| Y | RR5 | Paris snuffbox Rongorongo text Y Text Y of the rongorongo corpus, known as the Paris Snuff Box, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:Y is the standard designation, continuing from Barthel... |
Paris Musée de l'Homme The Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878... |
A 7-cm box cut and pieced together from 3 planed pieces of a tablet; 85 crude glyphs on outside of box only. Driftwood? |
| Z | T4 | Poike palimpsest Rongorongo text Z Text Z of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Poike, may be one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:Z is the standard designation, continuing from Barthel . Fischer numbers it among the imitative pieces made for tourists as T4.-Location:Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago... |
Santiago National Museum of Natural History in Chile The Chilean National Museum of Natural History is one of three national museums in Chile, along with the Museum of Fine Arts and the National History Museum. It is located in Quinta Normal.-History:... |
Driftwood? 11 cm. Apparently a palimpsest; Fischer does not consider the legible layer of text to be genuine. |
Crude glyphs have been found on a few stone objects and some additional wooden items, but most of these are thought to be fakes created for the early tourism market. Several of the 26 wooden texts are suspect due to uncertain provenance (X, Y, and Z), poor quality craftsmanship (F, K, V, W, Y, and Z), or to having been carved with a steel blade (K, V, and Y), and thus, although they may prove to be genuine, should not be trusted in initial attempts at decipherment. Z resembles many early forgeries in not being boustrophedon, but it may be a palimpsest
Palimpsest
A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος originally compounded from πάλιν and ψάω literally meaning “scraped...
on an authentic but now illegible text.
Additional texts
In addition to the petroglyphs mentioned above, there are a few other very short uncatalogued texts that may be rongorongo. Fischer reports that "many statuettes reveal rongorongo or rongorongo-like glyphs on their crown." He gives the example of a compound glyph,Glyphs
The only published reference to the glyphs which is even close to comprehensive remains Barthel (1958). Barthel assigned a three-digit numeric code to each glyph or group of similar-looking glyphs that he believed to be allographAllography
Allography, from the Greek for "other writing", has several meanings which all relate to how words and sounds are written down.-Allographs as authorship:...
s (variants). In the case of allography, the simple numeric code was assigned to what Barthel believed to be the basic form (Grundtypus), while variants were specified by alphabetic affixes. He assigned 600 numeric codes. The hundreds place is a numeral from 0 to 7, and categorizes the head, or overall form if there is no head: 0 and 1 for geometric shapes and inanimate objects; 2 for figures with "ears"; 3 and 4 for figures with open mouths (they are differentiated by their legs/tails); 5 for figures with miscellaneous heads; 6 for figures with beaks; and 7 for fish, arthropods, etc. The tens and units numerals were used similarly, so that for example glyphs 206, 306, 406, 506, and 606 all have a downward pointing wing or arm on the left and a raised four-fingered hand on the right:
- Coding: The first digit distinguishes head and basic body shape, and the six in the units place indicates a specific raised hand.
There is some arbitrariness to which glyphs are grouped together, and there are inconsistencies in the assignments of numerical codes and the use of affixes which make the system rather complex. However, despite its shortcomings, Barthel's is the only effective system ever proposed to categorize rongorongo glyphs.
Barthel (1971) claimed to have parsed the inventory of glyphs to 120, of which the other 480 are allographs or ligatures. The evidence was never published, but similar figures have been obtained by other scholars, such as Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov (2007).
Published corpus
For almost a century only a few of the texts were published. In 1875 the director of the Chilean National Museum of Natural History in SantiagoSantiago, Chile
Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...
, Rudolf Philippi, published the Santiago Staff, and Carroll (1892) published part of the Oar. Most texts remained beyond the reach of would-be decipherers until 1958, when Thomas Barthel published line drawings of almost all the known corpus in his Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift ("Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island script") which remains the fundamental reference to rongorongo. He transcribed texts A through X, over 99% of the corpus; the CEIPP
CEIPP
The C.E.I.P.P., or the Centre d'Etudes sur l'île de Pâques et la Polynésie is a geographic and anthropological group created by André Valenta and Michel-Alain Jumeau.The CEIPP is notable for its members' publications on Easter Island, which include:*Nouveau Regard sur l'île de Pâques, a...
estimates that it is 97% accurate. Barthel's line drawings were not produced free-hand but copied from rubbing
Rubbing
Rubbing is a reproduction of the texture of a surface with something to deposit marks, most often created with Charcoal, Wax, Crayons, Chalk, or various forms of Blotted and Rolled Ink...
s, which helped ensure their faithfulness to the originals.
Fischer (1997) published new line drawings. These include lines scored with obsidian but not finished with a shark tooth which had not been recorded by Barthel because the rubbings he used often did not show them, for example on tablet N. (However, in line Gv4 shown in the section on writing instruments above, the light lines were recorded by both Fischer and Barthel.) There are other omissions, such as a sequence of glyphs at the transition from line Ca6 to Ca7 which is missing from Barthel, presumably because the carving went over the side of the tablet and was missed by Barthel's rubbing. (This is right in the middle of Barthel's calendar.) However, other discrepancies between the two records are straightforward contradictions. For instance, the initial glyph of I12 (line 12 of the Santiago Staff) in Fischer does not correspond with that of Barthel or Philippi, which agree with each other, and Barthel's rubbing (below) is incompatible with Fischer's drawing. Barthel's annotation, Original doch 53.76! ("original indeed 53.76!"), suggests that he specifically verified Philippi's reading:
In addition, the next glyph (glyph 20, a "spindle with three knobs") is missing its right-side "sprout" (glyph 10) in Philippi's drawing. This may be the result of an error in the inking, since there is a blank space in its place. The corpus is thus tainted with quite some uncertainty. It has never been properly checked for want of high-quality photographs.
Decipherment
As with most undeciphered scripts, there are many fanciful interpretations and claimed translations of rongorongo. However, apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to have to do with a lunar calendarLunar calendar
A lunar calendar is a calendar that is based on cycles of the lunar phase. A common purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar or Hijri calendar. A feature of the Islamic calendar is that a year is always 12 months, so the months are not linked with the seasons and drift each solar year by 11 to...
, none of the texts are understood. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment, assuming rongorongo is truly writing: the small number of remaining texts, the lack of context such as illustrations in which to interpret them, and the poor attestation of the Old Rapanui language since modern Rapanui is heavily mixed with Tahitian
Tahitian language
Tahitian is an indigenous language spoken mainly in the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It is an Eastern Polynesian language closely related to the other indigenous languages spoken in French Polynesia: Marquesan, Tuamotuan, Mangarevan, and Austral Islands languages...
and is therefore unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets.
The prevailing opinion is that rongorongo is not true writing but proto-writing, or even a more limited mnemonic
Mnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
device for genealogy, choreography, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture. For example, the Atlas of Languages states, "It was probably used as a memory aid or for decorative purposes, not for recording the Rapanui language of the islanders." If this is the case, then there is little hope of ever deciphering it. For those who believe it to be writing, there is debate as to whether rongorongo is essentially logographic or syllabic
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...
, though it appears to be compatible with neither a pure logography nor a pure syllabary.
| 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 | 25 | 27AB | 28 | 34 | 38 | 41 | 44 | 46 | 47 | 50 | 52 | 53 |
| 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 66 | 67 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 74 | 76 | 91 |
| 95 | 99 | 200 | 240 | 280 | 380 | 400 | 530 | 660 | 700 | 720 | 730 | 901 |
| This basic inventory of rongorongo, proposed by Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov (2007), accounts for 99.7% of the intact texts, except for the idiosyncratic Staff. | ||||||||||||
External links
- The Rongorongo of Easter Island – the most complete and balanced description of rongorongo on the internet. (Offline since 2009. Incompletely archived from the original on 2007 October 17. Earlier archives available.)
- Michael EversonMichael EversonMichael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
's draft Unicode proposal for Rongorongo - The Rock Art of Rapa Nui by Georgia Lee
- Additional coverage on Spanish Wikipedia