Rongorongo

For Rongorongo, an ancestress of some New Zealand Māori tribes, see Rongorongo (wife of Turi)

For Rongorongo the settlement, see Beru Island

Rongorongo
File:Rongorongo Qr3-7 color.jpg
Script type	Undeciphered
Time period	Time of creation unknown, most tablets lost or destroyed in the 1860s
Direction	Boustrophedon
Languages	assumed to be Rapanui

Rongorongo (Template:PronEng in English, IPA: [ˌɾoŋoˈɾoŋo] in Rapa Nui) is the name of glyphs discovered on Easter Island in the 19th century that appear to be writing. They have resisted all attempts at decipherment, with only some calendrical and perhaps genealogical information having been identified.

Twenty-six wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, mostly tablets but also a chieftain's staff, a bird-man statue, and two reimiro ornaments, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. They are referred to by a single uppercase letter, such as tablet A, or by a name, such as the Mamari Tablet. The names are sometimes descriptive, and sometimes indicate where the object is kept, for example the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, the Santiago Staff.

Etymology and variant names

In the Rapanui language, rongorongo means 'to recite, to declaim, to chant out.' It is the reduplication of rongo 'message, order, notice'.

The Rapanui word rongo /ɾoŋo/^key has cognates in most Austronesian languages, from Malay dengar /dəŋar/ to Fijian rogoca /roŋoða/ and Hawaiian lono /lono/, as 'listen', 'hear', and derived meanings.

The full name of the script is said to have been kohau rongorongo "lines for chanting out", and the texts to have once been named by their topic. The kohau ta'u "lines of years" were annals, the kohau îka "lines of fishes" were lists of persons killed in war (îka "fish" figuratively meant "victim"), and the kohau ranga "lines of fugitives" were lists of war refugees.

Some authors have understood ta'u to refer to a separate form of writing, distinct from rongorongo:

The Islanders had another writing (the so-called "ta‘u script") which recorded their annals and other secular matters, but this has disappeared. (Barthel 1958b:66)

[T]he ta‘u was originally a type of rongorongo inscription. In the 1880s, a group of elders invented a derivative "script" called ta‘u with which to decorate carvings in order to increase their trading value. It is a primitive imitation of rongorongo. (Fischer 1997:667)

The mama or va‘eva‘e "script" described in some mid twentieth-century publications was "an early twentieth-century geometric [decorative] invention" (Fischer 1997:ix).

Form and construction

File:Rongorongo G-r Small Santiago (unretouched).jpg

The Small Santiago Tablet (tablet G) clearly shows the channels along which the glyphs were carved.

The rongorongo glyphs are contours of animate and geometric design, about one centimeter high, and standardized in form. In many instances they are carved in shallow channels running the length of irregular wooden tablets, as can be seen in the image of tablet G at right.

Writing media

File:Rongorongo K-v Small London (edge).jpg

To conserve space, the text wraps around the edge of tablet K.

Except for a few possible glyph cut in stone (see petroglyphs below), all surviving texts are inscribed in wood. According to tradition, the tablets were made of toromiro wood, and indeed several tablets has been identified as being toromiro and portia (makoi). (However, Orliac has identified most of the alleged toromiro tablets as portia wood.) Other tablets have been identified as Podocarpus or Prumnopitys (considered Podocarpus at the time of identification), though the species is uncertain. It is thought that irregular tablets were used in their entirety rather than squared off due to the scarcity of wood on the island.

Barthel suggested that rongorongo was influenced by writing on banana leaves such as this one, which has channels between its ribs reminiscent of the channels on the tablet shown above right.

Tradition has it that, due to this scarcity, only the experts carved wood, while pupils wrote on banana leaves. Barthel tried this, and commented the glyphs were quite visible due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. The dry leaves were fragile and would not have survived for long. (Fischer 1997:386)

A number of ethnological details point to the fact that the production of inscribed wooden tablets represents the second stage in the process of development. The first stage consisted in writing on banana leaves or on the sheaths from the banana trunk; the signs could be easily incised on the soft surface with a bone stylus. This "pre-writing" was the training for pupils [and also] for planning the individual sections of the text (Barthel 1971:1168)

Barthel hypothesized that the banana leaf might have served as a prototype for the tablets, with their grooved surface an emulation of the leaf structure:

Practical experiments with the material available on [Easter Island] have proved that the above-mentioned parts of the banana tree are not only an ideal writing material, but that in particular a direct correspondence exists between the height of the lines of writing and the distance between the veins on the leaves and stems of the banana tree. The classical inscriptions can be arranged in two groups according to the height of the lines (10-12 mm vs. 15 mm); this corresponds to the natural disposition of the veins on the banana stem (on average 10 mm in the lower part of a medium-sized tree) or on the banana leaf ([…] maximum 15mm). (Barthel 1971:1169)

A closeup of the verso of the Small Santiago Tablet, showing parts of lines 3 (bottom) to 7 (top). The glyphs of lines 3, 5, and 7 are right-side up, while those of lines 4 and 6 are up-side down.

Direction of writing

Rongorongo glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedon, 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.[2] 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 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.

Writing instruments

Most of Gv4 was carved with a shark tooth. However, the two parts of the glyph second from right are connected by a faint bent hairline that may have been inscribed with obsidian. (The chevrons are also linked by such a line, too faint to be seen here, which connects them to the hand of the human figure.)

Oral tradition has it that scribes used obsidian flakes or shark teeth to cut the glyphs (Métraux 1940:404).[3] The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though hairline cuts are also found. In the closeup image at right, a glyph is composed of two parts connected by such a hairline; this is a typical convention for this shape. Several researchers believe that these hairlines were cut by obsidian, and that the texts were initially sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a shark tooth; the remaining hairlines were then either errors, design conventions (as here), or decorative embellishments. Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hairline cuts, as can be seen repeatedly in the closeup of one end of tablet B below.

Tablet N, however, appears to be different:

Haberlandt (1886:102) has been the only scholar to notice that a different incising technique has been used with this tablet […] it appears that the "Small Vienna" had its glyphs incised with a sharpened bone instead of shark's tooth: it is principally evident by the shallowness and width of the contour grooves. It also displays secondary working with obsidian flakes to elaborate details within the finished contour lines. No other rongo-rongo inscription reveals such graphic extravagance. (Fischer 1997:501)

Other tablets appear to have been cut with a steel blade, often rather crudely. Although steel knives would have been available after the arrival of the Spanish, this does cast suspicion on the authenticity of these tablets.

The glyphs

A photographic negative of one end of tablet B. The numbers are line numbers; Fin de 13 means "end of [line] 13". (Click on image once to see it approximately life size.)

The glyphs are stylized human, animal, vegetable, and geometric shapes. Nearly all those with heads are orientated head up and either face outward or to the right, in the direction of writing. Heads often have characteristic projections on the sides which may be eyes (as on the turtle glyph below, and more clearly on turtle petroglyphs), but which often resemble ears (as on the anthropomorphic petroglyph in the next section). Birds are common. Other glyphs look like turtles, fish, crayfish, grubs, and so on. A few are similar to petroglyphs found throughout the island.

Origin

Oral tradition has it that Hotu Matu‘a, the legendary first settler of Rapa Nui, brought 67 tablets from his homeland. However, no likely homeland had a tradition of writing, in Polynesia or even in South America. Thus rongorongo appears to have been an internal development. Given the fact that there was a special word, tangata rongorongo, for someone able to read the glyphs, and that few if any of the Rapanui people left on the island in the 1870s could do so, it is likely that only a small minority were ever literate. Indeed, early visitors were told that it was a privilege of the ruling families and priests, who were all killed or kidnapped in the Peruvian slaving raids.

Dating the tablets

Tablet A (AKATahua or "The Oar") can be dated to the eighteenth or nineteenth century by virtue of being carved on a European oar made of ash. However, the wood used for some of the objects predates the first European contact. The wood used for tablet Q (Small Saint Petersburg) has been carbon dated to 1680-1740 by Catherine Orliac (2005). Orliac also calculated that the wood for tablet C (Mamari) was cut from the trunk of a Portia tree some 15m (50 feet) tall. (Mamari is 196mm (7½") wide, on its narrow dimension, and a trunk of that diameter corresponds to a height of 15m.) Easter Island had long been deforested of trees that size; as mentioned above, the once numerous palms had disappeared by 1650. Roggeveen, who discovered Easter Island in 1722, "described the island as destitute of large trees, and González in 1770 wrote, Not a single tree is to be found capable of furnishing a plank so much as six inches in width. Forster in 1774 reported that there was not a tree upon the island which exceeded the height of 10 feet (Flenley and Bahn 1992:172). However, this only dates the wood, which may have been used for other purposes before being inscribed.

Barthel glyph 067 may be an extinct palm.

Direct dating, however, is not the only evidence. One glyph is thought to be a palm tree, which disappeared from the island's pollen record circa 1650 and would thus suggest that the script is at least that old.

Similarly, if shark teeth are ever found that display wear from being used as writing instruments, they could be carbon dated as well.

The 1770 Spanish expedition: Trans-cultural diffusion of writing?

Several scholars have suggested that rongorongo may have had been a recent invention, spurred by the 1770 Spanish visit to the island:

Eyraud's claim that the tablets were to be found in every house [in 1864] is strangely at odds with the silence on this matter from previous visitors and with Mrs Routledge's belief that they used to be kept apart in special houses and were very strictly tapu [taboo].

The signatures from the 1770 Spanish treaty. (These were copied, with the original lost, and may not retain their original orientations)

The obvious conclusion is that the 'script' was a very late phenomenon, directly inspired by the visit of the Spanish under González in 1770, when a written proclamation of annexation was offered to the chiefs and priests to be 'signed in their native characters' (Flenley and Bahn 1992:203-204).

Notwithstanding, the Rapanui, who in their unparalleled isolation had been visited by outsiders only once before (1722), had witnessed European writing—and this in a liturgical, histrionic, and awesome context. What is more, they themselves had been enjoined by these opulent, colourful, and infinitely more puissant aliens to set ink to paper in an unforgettable performance imbued with might and mystique. Copying what these aliens had ritually enacted would doubtless have lent the Rapanui's experience a supernatural solemnity, indeed one of temporarily sharing European mana through the act of signing. (Fischer 1997:6-7)

Furthermore, the marks with which the chiefs signed the Spanish treaty do not resemble rongorongo. (Other Polynesian chiefs signed treaties with Europeans using indigenous signs, for example the Māori with the Treaty of Waitangi.[4])

The hypothesis of these researchers is not that rongorongo is itself a copy of the Latin alphabet, or 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, and fell into oblivion within a span of less than a hundred years.

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs in the cave Ana o Keke resemble the feather-like rongorongo glyph 3 (left) and a compound glyph 211:42 (center). A line of divots passes through them, followed by a V shape like glyph 27.

Easter Island has the richest collections of petroglyphs in Polynesia. (Lee 1992) Nearly every suitable surface has been carved, including the stone walls of some houses and a few of the famous mo‘ai statues. Around 1000 sites with over 4000 glyphs have been cataloged, some in bas-relief or intaglio, and some painted red and white. Designs include a concentration of chimeric bird-man figures at Orongo, a ceremonial center of the tangata manu or "bird-man" cult; faces of the creation deity Make-make; marine animals such as turtles, tuna, swordfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, crabs, and octopus (some with human faces); roosters, canoes, and over 500 komari (vulvas). Petroglyphs are often accompanied by carved divots ("cupules") in the rock. Changing traditions are preserved, such as bas-relief birdmen 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, and others are carved on a fallen mo‘ai topknot.[5]

Several of the anthropomorphic and animal-form petroglyphs have parallels in rongorongo, but no actual rongorongo texts have been identified among the petroglyphs. This has lead to the suggestion that rongorongo must be a recent creation, perhaps inspired by petroglyph designs or retaining individual petroglyphs as logograms (Macri 1995), but not old enough to have been incorporated into the petroglyphic tradition. However, there is what appears to be a short string of rongorongo glyphs carved on the wall of a cave (see image at right), though more commonly they are isolated, as here (a similar example here). McLaughlin (2004) illustrates the most prominent correspondences with the petroglyph corpus in Lee (1992).

The historical record

Eugène Eyraud: Discovery and oblivion

Eugène Eyraud, a lay friar of the Congrégation de Picpus, landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from Valparaiso. He was to remain on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing its inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay (Eyraud 1886: Vol.36, pp.52-71, 124-138) in which he reports his discovery of the tablets:

In every hut one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters: They are depictions of animals unknown on the island, which the natives draw with sharp stones. Each figure has its own name; but the scant attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now for them a habitual practice which they keep without seeking its meaning.

There is no other mention of the tablets in his report. The discovery went unnoticed and the tablets fell back into oblivion. It is not clear whether he observed natives writing on tablets or if he was merely told that the tablets were engraved with "sharp stones".

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.

Florentin-Etienne Jaussen: Rediscovery and disappearance

In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Etienne 'Tepano' Jaussen (Tepano is the Tahitian form of Etienne, via English Stephen), received a gift from the recent Catholic converts of Easter Island. It was a long string 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 no-one knew how to read them.

Yet Eugène Eyraud had seen hundreds of tablets only two years earlier. What happened to the missing tablets is a matter of conjecture; the mystery is compounded by the fact that earlier visitors made no mention of such artifacts. Eyraud had noted how little interest their owners had in them. Chauvet (1935:381-382 [6]) reports that,

The Bishop [Jaussen] questioned the Rapanui wise man, Ouroupano Hinapote, the son of the wise man Tekaki [who said that] he, himself, had begun the requisite studies and knew how to carve the characters with a small shark's tooth. He said that there was nobody left on the island who knew how to read the characters since the Peruvians had brought about the deaths of all the wise men and, thus, the pieces of wood were no longer of any interest to the natives who burned them as firewood or wound their fishing lines around them!

A. Pinart also saw some in 1877. [He] was not able to acquire these tablets because the natives were using them as reels for their fishing lines!

Catherine Orliac (2003/2004:48-53) has observed that the deep black indention, about 10 cm long, on lines 5 and 6 of the verso of tablet H is a groove made by the rubbing of a fire stick, showing that tablet H had been used for fire-making.

As European-introduced diseases and raids by Peruvian slavers, including a final devastating raid in 1862, had reduced the Rapa Nui population to 111 by 1872 (Métraux 1940:3), it is possible that all the remaining literate natives 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 remained.

Of the twenty-six texts that survive, only half are in good condition and authentic beyond doubt.

Katherine Routledge: Interviewing the elders

British archaeologist and anthropologist Katherine Routledge 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 in the information they gave.

Even so, Routledge concluded that the kohau rongorongo were litanies for priest-scribes, and that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device. That is, the glyphs were created by a particular person to help recall the island's history and stories, and as they were fluid in meaning and did not directly represent language, they could not be used by just anyone:

at present it seems likely that the system was one of memory, and that the signs were simply aids to recollection, or for keeping count like the beads of a rosary.

Given, therefore, that it was desired to remember lists of words, whether categories of names or correct forms of prayer, the repetition would be a labor of love, and to draw figures as aids to recollection would be very natural. (Routledge 1919:253-254)

The corpus

The rongorongo inscriptions are preserved on twenty-six wooden objects, each with between 2 and 2320 glyphs. There are over 14,000 glyphs total. The texts are mostly on oblong wooden tablets, with the exceptions of I, a chieftain's staff, also known as the Santiago Staff; X, a statuette also known as Tangata Manu (Birdman); and Y, a snuff box assembled from pieces cut from a rongorongo tablet.

The texts

Barthel refers to each of 26 texts he accepted as genuine with a letter of the alphabet. Most are inscribed on oblong tablets, the exceptions being text I (the Santiago Staff), inscribed on a chieftain's baton; texts J and L (Reimiro 1 and 2), inscribed on breast ornaments; and text X (Tangata Manu "Birdman"), inscribed on various parts of a sculpture of a man with a bird's head. Text Y is a snuff box assembled from three pieces of a wooden tablet, each cut in two lengthwise.

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.

Barthel code	Nickname	Recto / Side 'a'	Verso / Side 'b'	Location	Notes
A	Tahua			Rome	Carved into a European oar.
B	Aruku-Kurenga
C	Mamari		File:Rongorongo C-b Mamari color.jpg		Contains calendrical information.
D	Echancrée			Pape‘ete	The tablet first given to Jaussen, as a spool for a gift of hair.
E	Keiti			Leuven	Destroyed by fire in WWI. A copy survives.
F	Stephen-Chauvet			New York	A fragment, authenticity dubious. In the Arman collection.
G	Small Santiago			Santiago	May include a genealogy.
H	Great Santiago	File:Rongorongo H-r Great Santiago color.jpg
I	Santiago Staff				A chief's staff. The longest text, and the only one with punctuation.
J	Reimiro 1	File:Rongorongo J Reimiro 1.jpg		London	A breast ornament decorated with 2 glyphs.
K	Small London	File:Rongorongo K-r Small London (color).jpg			authenticity dubious
L	Reimiro 2	File:Rongorongo L Reimiro 2.jpg			A breast ornament decorated with a line of glyphs.
M	Great Vienna			Vienna	in poor condition
N	Small Vienna				intricate carving
O	"Boomerang"	File:Rongorongo O Boomerang.jpg	NA	Berlin	Only inscribed on one side. In poor condition.
P	Great St. Petersburg			St. Petersburg
Q	Small St. Petersburg	File:Rongorongo Q-r Small St Petersburg.jpg	File:Rongorongo Q-v small St Petersburg color.jpg		A closeup of Qr3-7 is shown in the infobox at the beginning of this article.
R	Atua-Mata-Riri			Washington
S	Great Washington
T	Honolulu 1 B.3629			Honolulu	in poor condition
U	Honolulu 2 B.3623				in poor condition
V	Honolulu 3 B.3622				in poor condition, authenticity dubious
W	Honolulu 4 B.445				a fragment, authenticity dubious
X	Tangata Manu			New York	A birdman statue decorated with scattered glyphs. Authenticity dubious.
Y	Snuff Box	File:Rongorongo Y snuff box (color).jpg	NA	Paris	Pieced together from 3 pieces of a tablet. Authenticity dubious.
Z	Poike	File:Rongorongo Z Poike.jpg	NA	Santiago	a worn fragment, authenticity dubious

Crude glyphs have been found on a few stone objects and some additional wooden items, but these are thought to be fakes created for the early tourism market. Several of Barthel's 26 texts are suspect due to uncertain provenance, poor quality craftsmanship (e.g. texts K, V, W, and Z), or to having been carved with a steel blade (texts K, X, V, and Y), and thus, although they may prove to be genuine, should not be trusted in initial attempts at decipherment. Z, like many early forgeries, is not boustrophedon, but may be a palimpsest on a worn authentic tablet (Fischer 1997:534).

The glyphs

The best published reference to the glyphs remains Barthel (1958a), a fairly exhaustive and well organized list. Barthel assigned a numeric code to each glyph or group of a few similar-looking glyphs, supplemented by alphabetical affixes expressing variations of presumed "basic glyphs" (Grundtypus). 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 and somewhat difficult to master. (See a summary here.) However, despite its shortcomings, Barthel's is the only effective system ever proposed to categorize rongorongo glyphs.

The published corpus

File:Roro-I01frottis.gif

Rubbing of first line of the Santiago Staff, used by Barthel (CEIPP archives)

For almost a century only a few of the texts were published. Philippi (1875) 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 Osterinselnschrift ('Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island script'), which remains the fundamental reference to rongorongo. Barthel's line drawings were not produced free-hand, but copied from careful rubbings, whence 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 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 are 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 are straightforward contradictions. For instance, the initial glyph of I12 (line 12 of the Santiago Staff) in Fischer (1997:451) does not correspond with that of Barthel (1958a:Appendix) or Philippi (1875), and Barthel's rubbing, below, is incompatible with Fischer's drawing. Barthel's annotation, Original doch 53.76! ('original [is] 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 due to 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 the rongorongo. However, apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to have to do with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood. There are three serious obstacles to decipherment: the small number of remaining texts, the lack of context such as illustrations in which to interpret them, and the fact that modern Rapanui is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is therefore unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets.

Several researchers have proposed that rongorongo is not true writing but proto-writing or a mnemonic device for genealogy, choreography, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture. For those who believe it is writing, there is debate as to whether it is essentially logographic or syllabic.

Jaussen: The failed Rosetta Stone

Father Roussel found no-one on Easter Island who could read the tablets, but in Tahiti Mgr Jaussen found a laborer from Easter Island, Metoro Tauaure, who claimed to be able to read them.

From 1869 to 1874 Jaussen worked with Metoro to decipher four tablets in his possession: B AKA Aruku-Kurenga, C AKA Mamari, D AKA Échancrée ("notched", the one around which the twine was wound), and E AKA Keiti. He published a list of the signs they identified. This is the famous Jaussen List which many at first took for a Rosetta Stone of rongorongo.

The Jaussen list has been criticized for, among other inadequacies, glossing five glyphs as "porcelain", a material not found on Rapa Nui. However, this originates in a mistranslation: Jaussen actually glossed the five glyphs as porcelaine, which is French for both porcelain and the porcelain-like cowrie. His Rapanui gloss was pure "cowrie".

Almost a century later, Thomas Barthel (1958a:173-199) published some of Jaussen's notes. Guy (1999) compared these with Barthel's sketches of the tablets and found that,

Comparing Metoro's readings against the hieroglyphic texts shows that he read the obverse of the last two tablets in an order incompatible with any understanding of their contents. Metoro read the lunar calendar of tablet Mamari last line first, and failed to recognize the very obvious pictographic sign for the full moon. Not only did he read every single line of the obverse of tablet Keiti backwards, from end to beginning, but he skipped the first six signs, and reinserted them after finishing reading the second line.

He concludes: Metoro knew nothing. Or, if he knew anything, he was careful not to reveal it.

Thomson: A rich harvest of observations

William J. Thomson, paymaster on the USS Mohican, spent twelve days on Easter Island from 1886 19 December to 30 December, during which time he made an impressive number of observations, including some which are of interest for the decipherment of the rongorongo.

Ure Vaeiko's recitations

Thomson was told of an old man called Ure Vaeiko who "professes to have been under instructions in the art of hieroglyphic reading at the time of the Peruvian visit, and claims to understand most of the characters." When Thomson plied him with gifts and money to read the two tablets he had purchased, Ure Vaeiko "declined most positively to ruin his chances for salvation by doing what his Christian instructors had forbidden" and finally fled (Thomson 1889:515). However, Thomson had taken photographs of Jaussen's tablets when the USS Mohican was in Tahiti, and he eventually cajoled Ure Vaeiko into reading from those photographs. Alexandre Salmon took down Ure Vaeiko's dictation, which he later translated into English, for the following tablets:

Recitation	Corresponding plates in Thomson 1889	Corresponding tablet
Apai	XXXVI, XXVII	E (Keiti)
Atua-Mata-Riri	XXXVIII, XXXIX	R (Small Washington)
Eaha to ran ariiki Kete	XL, XLI	S (Great Washington)
Ka ihi uiga	XLII, XLIII	D (Échancrée)
Ate-a-renga-hokau iti poheraa	XLIV, XLV	C (Mamari)

Apart from Atua-Mata-Riri, which is almost entirely composed of proper names, Salmon's translations do not match Ure Vaeiko's readings. The readings themselves, seemingly reliable although difficult to interpret at first, become clearly ridiculous towards the end. The last recitation, for instance, which has been accepted as a love song on the strength of Salmon's English translation, is interspersed with Tahitian phrases which would not be expected on a pre-contact text, such as "the French flag" (te riva forani) and "give money for revealing [this]" (horoa moni e fahiti). The very title is a mixture of Rapanui and Tahitian: pohera‘a is Tahitian for "death". (The Rapanui word is matenga.) Ure Vaeiko was an unwilling informant, and it is not surprising that any information he gave should be compromised: Even with duress, Thomson was only able to gain his cooperation with "the cup that cheers" (that is, rum).

The ancient calendar

Among the data Thomson collected were the names of the nights of the lunar month and of the months of the year. The calendar collected by Thomson is notable in that it contains thirteen months. All other authors mention only twelve, and Métraux and Barthel find fault with Thomson:

Thomson translates Anakena as August and suggests that the year began at that time because Hotu-Matua landed at Anakena in that month, but my informants and Roussel (1869) give Anakena as July. (Métraux 1940:52)

We are basing the substitution on the lists by Metraux and Englert (ME:51; HM:310), which are in agreement. Thomson's list is off by one month. (Barthel 1978:48)

However, Guy (1992) calculated the dates of the new moon for years 1885 to 1887 and showed that Thomson's list fit the phases of the moon for 1886. He concluded that the ancient Rapanui used a lunisolar calendar with kotuti as its embolismic month (AKA "leap month"), and that Thomson chanced to land on Easter Island in a year with a leap month.

Fanciful decipherments

In 1892 the Australian pediatrician Alan Carroll published a fanciful translation, based on the idea that the texts were written by the extinct "Long-Ear" population of Easter Island in a mixture of Quechua and several other languages of Peru and Mesoamerica. Because of the costs of casting special type for rongorongo, no method, analysis, or sound values of the individual glyphs were ever published. Carroll continued to publish short communications until 1908 in Science of Man, the journal of the (Royal) Anthropological Society of Australasia. Carroll had himself founded the society, which is "nowadays seen as forming part of the 'lunatic fringe'."[7]

In 1932 the Hungarian Vilmos Hevesy (Guillaume de Hevesy) published an article claiming a relationship between Rongorongo and the newly discovered Indus Valley script, based on superficial similarities of form, which was presented to the French Academy of Inscriptions and Literature by the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot. Without an easy way for Hevesy to typeset rongorongo or identify the glyphs under discussion, it was not apparent that several of the rongorongo glyphs used in his comparisons were fabrications. Despite the fact that both scripts were undeciphered (as they are to this day), separated by half the world and half of history (19,000 km and 4000 years), and had no known intermediate stages, Hevesy's ideas were taken seriously enough in academic circles to prompt a 1934 Franco-Belgian expedition to Easter Island led by Lavachery and Métraux (Métraux 1939). Hevesy's theories were published as late as 1938 in such respected anthropological journals as Man. However, there is no longer any mention of them in Métraux's 1940 Ethnology of Easter Island.

Kudrjavtsev: The discovery of parallel texts

During World War II, a small group of students in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) became interested in the tablets on display at the Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology. They discovered that the same text occurred with minor variations on three tablets (H, P, and Q), a start in unraveling the structure of the script. One of the group, Boris G. Kudrjavtsev, wrote up their findings, which were published posthumously (Kudrjavtsev 1949). More, partial, parallel texts have since been identified. Horley (2005) has carried out a statistical analysis of them.

File:Roro-HPQ3.gif Short excerpt of the parallel text on tablets H, P, and Q

Since then, the parallels have been noticed on tablets A and K as well.

Butinov & Knorozov: A genealogy on tablet G?

In 1957 Nikolai A. Butinov and Yuri Knorozov suggested that the repetitive structure of a sequence of some 15 signs on Gv6 (line 6 of the verso of the Small Santiago Tablet) was compatible with a genealogy. It reads in part,

Now, if the repeated independent glyph 200 (in red) is a title, such as "king", and if the repeated attached glyph 76 (in green) is a patronymic marker, then this means something like:

King A, B's son, King B, C's son, King C, D's son, King D, E's son,

and the sequence is a lineage.

If Butinov and Knorozov are correct then, first, we can identify other sign sequences which constitute personal names. Second, the Santiago Staff would consist mostly of persons' names as it bears 564 occurrences of 76, the putative patronymic marker. Third, the sequence 606.76 700 below translated by Fischer as "all the birds copulated with the fish" would in reality mean (So-and-so) son of 606 was killed. The Santiago Staff, with 63 occurrences of sign 700 meaning "victim," would then be in part a kohau îka.

Barthel: A calendar on tablet C

Thomas Barthel, who first published the rongorongo corpus, identified three lines on side a of tablet C, also known as Mamari, as a lunar calendar (Barthel 1958a:242ff). Guy (1990) demonstrated more precisely that it was likely an astronomical rule for when one or two intercalary nights should be inserted into the 28-night Rapanui month to keep it in sync with the phases of the moon. This is the only example of rongorongo that is currently accepted as being understood, though it cannot actually be read.

The Mamari 'calendar' starts midway through line 6 (bottom center, upside down) and continues to the start of line 9 (top left). Two glyphs completing the purple sequence (dots) are not visible at the end of line 6 and start of 7.

The 'calendar' consists of a repeated sequence of four compound glyphs (colored purple in the negative of the tablet shown here) followed by a varying number of lunar crescents representing, in total, the 28 nights of the month (colored red). (Several crescents are modified by additional glyphs, colored green, which Guy (1990) argues have phonetic values.) The lunar crescents are not pictographic: Other than the two nights in the middle, at the full moon, they are all the same width and all face the same direction. The first two glyphs of the purple sequence are compounds with a lunar crescent (the reverse of the crescents counting the 28 nights), and the fourth, based on a six-point star which may represent the sun, has an attached fish on a line. In the four sequences leading up to the full moon (one not visible here), these fish (colored yellow) hang head up; in the sequences after the full moon, they hang head down. (Remember, lines 6 and 8 are themselves inverted.) Guy argues that these represent respectively the waxing and waning of the moon. After the 28 nights of the standard month, the purple sequence repeats, but this time it is followed by a new sequence of three glyphs (end of line Ca8) and then two crescents for the intercalary nights (start of line Ca9).

In 1971 Barthel claimed to have parsed the inventory of glyphs to 120, of which the others are ligatures, but the evidence was never published.

Fischer: Attempted decipherment

In 1995 Steven Fischer announced that he had cracked the rongorongo code. In the decade since, this has not been accepted by other researchers, who feel that Fischer overstated the patterns that formed the basis of his decipherment.

Decipherment

Fischer noticed that text of the 1.25m Santiago Staff (Barthel's object I, which was perhaps sacred, and also the object with the longest inscription) is unlike that of the other objects in that it appears to have punctuation: The text is divided by "103 vertical lines at odd intervals" (See figure). Fischer remarks that glyph 76, identified as a patronymic marker by Butinov & Knorozov, is found attached to the first glyph in each section of text, and that "almost all" sections contain a multiple of three glyph compounds, with the first glyph of each three bearing a glyph 76 "suffix".

Fischer interprets glyph 76 as a phallus and the text of the Santiago Staff as a creation chant consisting of hundreds of repetitions of X-phallus Y Z to be interpreted as X copulated with Y, there issued forth Z. His primary example is,

File:606 76-700-8.gif

about half-way through line 12 of the Santiago Staff. (The numbers are Barthel's identification codes.) Fischer interprets glyph 606 as "bird"+"hand", with the phallus attached as usual at its lower right; glyph 700 as "fish"; and glyph 8 as "sun".

On the basis that the Rapanui word ma'u "to take" is nearly homophonous with a plural marker mau, he posits that the hand of 606 is that plural marker via a semantic shift of "hand" → "take", and thus he translates 606 as "all the birds". Taking penis to mean "copulate", he reads the sequence 606.76 700 8 as "all (the) birds copulated, fish, sun".

Fischer supports his interpretation by claiming similarities to the recitation Atua-Mata-Riri, so called from its first words, which was collected by William Thomson. This recitation is a litany of which each verse is of the form X, ki 'ai ki roto ki Y, ka pû te Z, literally "X having been inside Y the Z comes forward". Here is the first verse, according to Salmon and then according to Métraux:

Salmon:

• Atua Matariri; Ki ai Kiroto, Kia Taporo, Kapu te Poporo.
• "God Atua Matariri and goddess Taporo produced thistle."

Métraux:

• Atua-matariri ki ai ki roto ki a te Poro, ka pu te poporo.
• "God-of-the-angry-look by copulating with Roundness (?) produced the poporo (black nightshade, Solanum nigrum)."

Fischer proposes that the glyph sequence 606.76 700 8, literally manu mau ai ika ra'â "bird hand/all copulate fish sun", had a parallel reading of:

• te manu mau ki 'ai ki roto ki te ika, ka pû te ra'â
• "All the birds copulated with the fish, there issued forth the sun."

He concludes that it is only a matter of time before the Santiago Staff is deciphered.

Objections

There are a number of objections to Fischer's decipherment:

• When Andrew Robinson checked the claimed pattern, he found that "Close inspection of the Santiago Staff reveals that only 63 out of the 113 [sic] sequences on the staff fully obey the triad structure (and 63 is the maximum figure, giving every Fischer attribution the benefit of the doubt)" (Robinson 2002:241). Glyph 76 also occurs in isolation and combined with several glyphs in a row. (For example the last section of figure 2 in Fischer's on-line article, which reads 604.76-76-206.76.)
• The plural marker mau does not exist in Rapanui, but is instead an element of Tahitian grammar. However, even if it did occur in Rapanui, Polynesian mau is only a plural marker when it precedes a noun; after a noun it's an adjective that means "true, genuine, proper" (Guy 1998).
• No Polynesian myth tells of birds copulating with fish to produce the sun. Fischer justifies his interpretation thus: This is very close to [verse] number 25 from Daniel Ure Va'e Iko's procreation chant [Atua-Matariri] "Land copulated with the fish Ruhi Paralyzer: There issued forth the sun." However, this claim depends on Salmon's English translation, which does not follow from his Rapanui transcription of Heima; Ki ai Kiroto Kairui Kairui-Hakamarui Kapu te Raa. Métraux (1940:321) gives the following interpretation of that verse:

He Hina [He ima?] ki ai ki roto kia Rui-haka-ma-rui, ka pu te raa.

"Moon (?) by copulating with Darkness (?) produced Sun",

which mentions neither birds nor fish.

• Given Fischer's reading, Butinov & Knorozov's putative genealogy on tablet G becomes:

[...] copulated with Y, there issued forth A

B copulated with Y, there issued forth B

C copulated with Y, there issued forth C

D copulated with Y, there issued forth D

Fischer later announced parallels with other texts. As Jacques Guy put it,[8]

he claims to have identified similar copulation stories on "eleven other tablets, all of them lacking the phallic suffix". In other words, wherever he did not see a phallus, he supplied one.

Richard Sproat automated the search for string matches between the texts and found that the staff stood alone:[9]

As an attempt at a test for Fischer's "phallus omission" assumption, we computed the same string matches for a version of the corpus where glyph 76, the phallus symbol, had been removed. Presumably if many parts of the other tablets are really texts that are like the Santiago Staff, albeit sans explicit phallus, one ought to increase one's chance of finding matches between the Staff and other tablets by removing the offending member. The results were the same as for the unadulterated version of the corpus: the Santiago staff still appears as an isolate.

Pozdniakov: A syllabic script?

Having compared all the texts of the rongorongo corpus, Pozdniakov (1996) made two observations:

1. All texts except I and G verso consist of longish strings of glyphs repeated on different tablets in different contexts. He reports having identified some 50 different strings, and remarks that they begin and end with a very limited number of distinct glyphs.
2. Some glyphs or components of glyphs occur in free variation both in isolation and as components of anthropomorphic, bird, and inanimate figures. Thus Pozdniakov proposes that the two hand shapes, 6 (three fingers and a thumb) and 64 (a fork), are variants of a single glyph, which also occurs attached to human figures, such as 204 and 206; bird figures, such as 604 and 606; shark-like figures, such as 734 and 736; and inanimate figures, such as 65 and 132, or 84 and 56.

Such variation drastically reduces the number of distinct glyphs in Barthel's inventory, leading Pozdniakov to the conclusion that rongorongo is essentially a syllabary with a logographic component. He presents frequency distribution curves of the syllables of the recitation Apai (see above) and of the elementary components of the rongorongo glyphs, and sees in the close agreement of the two evidence that the rongorongo match the spoken language. However, as Sproat has remarked,[10] the match to the spoken language may be nothing more than an effect of Zipf's law.

Martha Macri of the University of California, Davis has independently proposed that the majority of Barthel's glyphs are fused compounds of fewer than 70 basic components, suggesting that rongorongo may be a syllabary augmented by perhaps a dozen logograms. (Since Rapanui has 10 consonants and 5 vowels, for 50 consonant-vowel syllables plus 5 vowel-only syllables, fifty-five glyphs would be required for a pure syllabary, assuming long vowels (as in kâ) were either ignored (written ka) or written as extra vowels (kaa), and that diphthongs were also written as vowel sequences, all common conventions in syllabaries.) However, she brings no evidence, does not explain her method for distinguishing meaningful components from purely graphic components of the glyphs, and has not written anything on the subject since a short summary in 1995.

Modern manuscripts

The 1955 Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island directed by Thor Heyerdahl, recovered several rongorongo manuscripts known as A, B, C, and D, some on exercise books, some on ledger books. Photographic reproductions were published in Heyerdahl (1965: 2.420-458). These contain rather faithful copies or adaptations of Jaussen's material, not an original use of rongorongo. There is also calendrical information in the Latin alphabet: One page of manuscript A (AKA Esteban Atan manuscript) is a failed attempt at matching the months of the old luni-solar calendar with those of the modern solar calendar (Heyerdahl 1965, Fig. 110); another page (Fig. 128) is a similarly fruitless attempt to match nights of the old lunar month to the 30 nights of June 1936.

During his fieldwork on Easter Island in 1957-58 Barthel discovered two further manuscripts, known as E and F (Heyerdahl 1965:2.387-389).

External links

• www.rongorongo.org, with Barthel's tracings of glyphs and texts (currently off-line).
• Discussion by Steven Fischer, with critique by Jacques Guy
• Richard Sproat lecture at LSA 2007
• Draft Unicode proposal for rongorongo
• The Rock Art of Rapa Nui by Georgia Lee

Bibliography

• BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1958a. Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift. Hamburg : Cram, de Gruyter.
• BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1958b. "The 'Talking Boards' of Easter Island." Scientific American, 198:61-68
• BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1971. Pre-contact Writing in Oceania. In: Current Trends in Linguistics 8:1165-1186. Den Haag, Paris: Mouton.
• BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1978. The Eighth Land. Honolulu: the University Press of Hawaii.
• BUTINOV, Nikolai A., & Yuri V. KNOROZOV. 1957. "Preliminary Report on the Study of the Written Language of Easter Island." Journal of the Polynesian Society 66. 1:5-17.
• CARROLL, Alan. 1892. "The Easter Island inscriptions, and the translation and interpretation of them." Journal of the Polynesian Society 1:103-106, 233-252.
• CHAUVET, Stéphen-Charles. 1935. L'île de Pâques et ses mystères. Paris: Éditions Tel. (An online English version translated by Ann Altman and edited by Shawn McLaughlin is available www.chauvet-translation.com here.)
• DEDEREN, F. and Steven Roger Fischer. 1993. Traditional Production of the Rapanui Tablets. In Fischer (ed.) Easter Island Studies: Contributions to the History of Rapanui in Memory of William T. Mulloy. Oxford: Oxbow Monograph 32.
• ENGLERT, Sebastian. 1970. Island at the Center of the World. Translated and Edited by William Mulloy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• ENGLERT, Sebastian. 1993. La tierra de Hotu Matu‘a — Historia y Etnología de la Isla de Pascua, Gramática y Diccionario del antiguo idioma de la isla. Sexta edición aumentada. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria.
• ENGLERT, Sebastian. 2002. Legends of Easter Island. Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum. Easter Island — Rapa Nui. (Translation by Ben LeFort and Pilar Pacheco of Leyendas de Isla de Pascua (textos bilingües), Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1980.)
• EYRAUD, Eugène. Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, Lyon, 1886.
• FLENLEY, John, and Paul G. BAHN. 1992. Easter Island, Earth Island. Thames & Hudson.
• FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1995. "Preliminary Evidence for Cosmogonic Texts in Rapanui's Rongorongo Inscriptions." Journal of the Polynesian Society 104. 303-21.
• FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1997. RongoRongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts. Oxford and N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
• GUY, Jacques B.M. 1990. "On the Lunar Calendar of Tablet Mamari", Journal de la Société des Océanistes 91:2.135-49.
• GUY, Jacques B.M. 1992. "À propos des mois de l'ancien calendrier pascuan" ("On the months of the old Easter Island calender"), Journal de la Société des Océanistes 94-1:119-125
• GUY, Jacques B.M. 1998. "Un prétendu déchiffrement des tablettes de l'île de Pâques" ("A purported decipherment of the Easter Island tablets"), Journal de la Société des Océanistes 106:57-63.
• GUY, Jacques B.M. 1999. "Peut-on se fonder sur le témoignage de Métoro pour déchiffrer les rongo-rongo ?" ("Can one rely on the testimony of Metoro to decipher rongorongo?"), Journal de la Société des Océanistes 108:125-132
• FLENLEY, John R. & Paul G. BAHN. 1992. Easter Island, Earth Island. London: Thames & Hudson
• De HEVESY, Guillaume. 1932. "Lettre à M. Pelliot sur une écriture mystérieuse du bassin de l'Indus." Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Comptes-rendus des séances de l'année 1932. Bulletin de juillet-septembre. Séance du 16 septembre 1932. p.310.
• HEYERDAHL, Thor. 1965. The Concept of Rongorongo Among the Historic Population of Easter Island. In: Thor Heyerdahl & Edwin N. Ferdon Jr. (eds. and others.), 1961-65. Stockholm: Forum.
• HORLEY, Paul. 2005. "Allographic Variations and Statistical Analysis of the Rongorongo Script." Rapa Nui Journal 19:2.107-116.
• KUDRJAVTSEV, Boris G. 1949. Письменность острова Пасхи (Pis'mennost' ostrova Paskhi "The Writing of Easter Island"). Saint Petersburg: Sbornik Muzeja Antropologii i Ehtnografii. Vol.11 pp.175-221.
• LEE, Georgia. 1992. The Rock Art of Easter Island. Symbols of Power, Prayers to the Gods. Monumenta Arqueologia. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology Publications.
• MACRI, Martha. J. 1995. RongoRongo of Easter Island. Section 13. In: Daniels & Bright (eds.) The World's Writing Systems. N.Y. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996:183-8.
• MÉTRAUX, Alfred. 1939. "Mysteries of Easter Island." The Yale Review 28-4:758-779. New Haven: Yale University. (An online PDF version is available here)
• MÉTRAUX, Alfred. 1940. "Ethnology of Easter Island." Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 160. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum Press.
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