Rongorongo

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For the ancestress of some Māori tribes, see Rongorongo (wife of Turi). For the settlement, see Beru Island.

Rongorongo (in English, ˌɾoŋoˈɾoŋo in Rapa Nui) is the name of the glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island, that appear to be writing. They have resisted all attempts at decipherment, except for the identification of some calendrical and perhaps genealogical information.

Twenty-six wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. The objects are mostly tablets but also include a chieftain's staff, a bird-man statuette, and two reimiro ornaments. None of them 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. These 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/^IPA has cognates in most other 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 motu mo rongorongo "lines incised for chanting out" (Englert 1993), shortened to kohau rongorongo "lines for chanting out"; the texts are said 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" 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 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, June 1958:66)

[T]he 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. (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

The rongorongo glyphs are contours of living organisms and geometric designs, about one centimeter high, and standardized in form. The wooden tablets are irregular in shape, and in many instances fluted (tablets B, E, G, H, O, Q, and 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 tablets were used in their entirety rather than squared off due to the scarcity of wood on the island.

Writing media 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 microscopes, and determined that all were instead made from 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 (Skjølsvold 1994, as cited in Orliac 2005). However, not all the wood was native: Orliac (2007) established that tablets N, P, and S were made of South African Yellowwood and therefore that the wood had arrived with Western contact. Fischer had previously described P as "a damaged and reshapen European or American oar", as were A (which is European ash) and V; 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 used as planking for a Rapanui driftwood canoe (Fischer 1997:483). Several texts, including O, are carved on gnarled driftwood (Fischer 1997:497); the fact that the islanders were reduced to inscribing driftwood, and were extremely economical in their use of wood, may have consequences for the structure of the script (Fischer 1997:383).

Tradition has it that, due to its scarcity, only the experts carved wood, while pupils wrote on banana leaves. German ethnologist Thomas Barthel tried this, and commented the glyphs were quite visible due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. When the leaves dried they became 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 fluted 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)

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. 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.

Larger tablets and staves may have been read without turning, if the reader were able to read upside-down (Fischer 1997:353). Writing instruments Oral tradition has it that scribes used obsidian flakes or shark teeth to cut the glyphs (Métraux 1940:404). The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though hair-line cuts are also found. In the closeup image at right, a glyph is composed of two parts connected by such a hair-line; this is a typical convention for this shape. Several researchers believe that these hair-lines were cut by obsidian, and that the texts were initially sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a shark tooth; the remaining hair-lines were then either errors, design conventions (as here), 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.

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

The glyphs are stylized human, animal, vegetable, and geometric shapes, and often form compounds. Nearly all those with heads are orientated head up and are either seen face on or in profile 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 that few if any of the Rapanui people left 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 it 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 (Cooke 1899:712, Englert 1970:149-153).

Dating the tablets

Little direct dating has been done. Tablet Q (Small Saint Petersburg) is the sole item that has been carbon dated; however, the results only constrain the date to sometime after 1680 (Orliac 2005).

Direct dating, however, is not the only evidence. Texts A, P, and V can be dated to the eighteenth or nineteenth century by virtue of being inscribed on European oars. One glyph, (Barthel 067), is thought to be an extinct palm tree, which disappeared from the island's pollen record circa 1650 and thus suggests that the script is at least that old. Orliac (2005) calculated that the wood for tablet C (Mamari) was cut from the trunk of a tree some tall: Mamari is 19.6 cm (7½") wide and includes sapwood along its edges; a trunk of that diameter corresponds to Pacific rosewood's maximum height of 15 m. 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 Felipe González 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] (Flenley and Bahn 1992:172).

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 (Orliac 2005). Also, if shark teeth are ever found that display wear from being used as writing instruments, they could give a more direct carbon date of the inscriptions.

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 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).

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. )

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. 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. The fact that the script was not observed by early explorers, who spent little time on the island, may simply reflect that it was taboo at the time; such taboos and the tangata rongorongo may have lost power when Rapanui society collapsed following European slave raids and epidemics (Bahn 1996), so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day.

Petroglyphs

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 one thousand sites with over four thousand 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 five hundred 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, suggesting they are relatively old, while others were carved on a fallen mo‘ai topknot, suggesting they were carved after the mo‘ai was knocked down.

Several of the anthropomorphic and animal-form petroglyphs have parallels in rongorongo, such as the double-headed frigatebird (glyph 680) on the mo‘ai topknot above, which also appears on a dozen tablets. McLaughlin (2004) illustrates the most prominent correspondences with the petroglyph corpus of Lee (1992). However, few rongorongo-like sequences or compounds have been found 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. The best candidate for petroglyphic rongorongo is what appears to be a short sequence of glyphs, one of which is a compound glyph, carved on the wall of a cave (see image at right).

The historical record

Eugène Eyraud: Discovery

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, and the discovery went unnoticed. 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-Étienne Jaussen: Rediscovery and disappearance

In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne 'Tepano' Jaussen, 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) reports that,

The Bishop 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!

Orliac (2003/2004:48-53) 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. S and P had been cut into planking for a canoe. 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 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 Corbeta 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, she believed the glyphs were proto-writing, 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 twenty-six rongorongo texts with letter codes are inscribed on wooden objects, each with between 2 and 2320 glyphs and elements of compound glyphs, for over 14,000 glyph elements 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 reimiro pectoral ornaments; 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. 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.

The classic texts

Barthel refers to each of 26 texts he accepted as genuine with a letter of the alphabet. 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	Fischer code	Nickname	Recto / Side 'a'	Verso / Side 'b'	Location	Notes
A	RR1	Tahua (The Oar)			Rome	Inscribed on a European or American oar. Ash wood.
B	RR4	Aruku Kurenga				Fluted rosewood.
C	RR2	Mamari				Contains calendrical information. Rosewood.
D	RR3	Echancrée			Pape‘ete	The tablet first given to Jaussen, as a spool for a gift of hair. The two sides are written in different hands. Yellowwood?
E	RR6	Keiti			Leuven	Fluted. Destroyed by fire in WWI. A copy survives.
F	RR7	Chauvet			New York	A fragment, crudely executed. In the Arman collection. Palm wood?
G	RR8	Small Santiago			Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Chile	May include a genealogy. Fluted rosewood.
H	RR9	Large Santiago				Fluted rosewood.
I	RR10	Santiago Staff				A chief's staff. The longest text, and the only one which appears to have punctuation.
J	RR20	Short Reimiro			London	A breast ornament decorated with 2 glyphs. May be old.
K	RR19	London				Duplicates half of Gr, though not a direct copy. Crudely executed. Rosewood.
L	RR21	Long Reimiro				A breast ornament decorated with a line of glyphs. May be old. Rosewood.
M	RR24	Large Vienna		NA	Vienna	Side b is destroyed. In poor condition; an early cast preserves more of the text. Rosewood.
N	RR23	Small Vienna				Intricate carving. Yellowwood.
O	RR22	Berlin		NA	Ethnologisches Museum	Fluted driftwood. In poor condition; none of the glyphs on side b can be identified.
P	RR18	Large St Petersburg			St. Petersburg	Inscribed on a European or American oar. Yellowwood. Used for planking.
Q	RR17	Small St Petersburg				Fluted rosewood. A closeup of Qr3-7 is shown in the infobox at the beginning of this article.
R	RR15	Small Washington			Washington
S	RR16	Large Washington				Yellowwood. Used for planking.
T	RR11	Honolulu 1 (fluted)		NA	Honolulu	Fluted. In poor condition, side b is illegible.
U	RR12	Honolulu 2 (beam)		NA		A European or American beam? In poor condition. The two sides are written in different hands.
V	RR13	Honolulu 3 (oar)		NA		Inscribed on a European or American oar. 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 4 (encased)	NA	NA		A fragment. Only one side described.
X	RR25	Tangata Manu (New York Birdman)			New York	A birdman statuette decorated with seven scattered texts.
Y	RR5	Paris Snuffbox			Paris	Cut and pieced together from 3 planed pieces of a tablet; glyphs on outside of box only. Driftwood?
Z	T4	Poike		NA	Santiago	A worn fragment. Driftwood? Perhaps 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 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 a worn authentic tablet (Fischer 1997:534).

Additional texts

In addition to the petroglyphs mentioned above, there are a few other very short texts which might be rongorongo. Fischer (1997) reports that 'Many statuettes reveal rongorongo or rongorongo-like glyphs on their crown.' He gives the example of a compound glyph, 002 inside 070: , on the crown of a mo‘ai pakapaka statuette. (Although this compound is not otherwise attested, it is formally analogous to other compounds based on glyph 070.) Other designs, such as tattoos and inscriptions on skulls, are possibly simplex rongorongo glyphs, but as with simplex petroglyphs, it's difficult to know whether they are decorative, ideographic, or linguistic.

The 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 allographs (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 miscelaneous 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 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.

In 1971 Barthel claimed to have parsed the inventory of glyphs to 120 from those 600, of which the others are allographs or ligatures. The evidence was never published, but similar figures have been obtained by other scholars, such as Pozdniakov.

The published corpus

For almost a century only a few of the texts were published. The director of the National Museum of Natural History in Santiago de Chile, Rudolf Philippi, published the Santiago Staff (Philippi 1875), 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, and the CEIPP estimates that it is 97% accurate. 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 (1958: Appendix) or Philippi (1875), and Barthel's rubbing, below, is incompatible with Fischer's drawing. Barthel's annotation, Original doch 53.76! ('original indeed [is] 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 Msgr 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 of the tablets in his possession: B Aruku-Kurenga, C Mamari, D Échancrée ("notched", the one around which the twine was wound), and E 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. This is a mistranslation: Jaussen glossed the five glyphs as porcelaine, French for both porcelain and the porcelain-like cowrie. However, his Rapanui gloss was "cowrie" (pure).

Almost a century later, Thomas Barthel (1958:173-199) published some of Jaussen's notes. Guy (1999a) compared these with Barthel's sketches of the tablets and found that Metoro had read them "in an order incompatible with any understanding of their contents", reading the lunar calendar backwards and failing to recognized the "very obvious" pictogram of the full moon, and reading the lines of Keiti backwards on the obverse but forwards on the reverse. He concludes that Metoro either knew nothing or 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. The ancient calendar Among the ethnographic data Thomson collected were the names of the nights of the lunar month and of the months of the year. This is key to interpreting the single identifiable sequence of rongorongo, and is notable in that it contains thirteen months: Other sources mention only twelve. Métraux (1940:52) criticizes Thomson for translating Anakena as August when in 1869 Roussel identified it as July, and Barthel (1978:48) restricts his work to Métraux and Englert, because they are in agreement while "Thomson's list is off by one month".

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 (its "leap month"), and that Thomson chanced to land on Easter Island in a year with a leap month.Ure Va‘eiko's recitations Thomson was told of an old man called Ure Va‘eiko 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." He had been a servant of King Nga‘ara, the last king said to have had knowledge of writing. When Thomson plied him with gifts and money to read the two tablets he had purchased, Ure Va‘eiko "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 Va‘eiko into reading from those photographs. Alexandre Salmon took down Ure Va‘eiko'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 Matariri (Salmon trans.) (Métraux trans.)	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 Va‘eiko'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 Va‘eiko was an unwilling informant: Even with duress, Thomson was only able to gain his cooperation with "the cup that cheers" (that is, rum). It is not surprising that information provided by an uncooperative and increasingly drunk informant should be compromised.

Nonetheless, while no one has succeeded in correlating Ure Va‘eiko's readings with the rongorongo texts, that does not mean they are worthless for decipherment. The first recitations, Apai and Atua Matariri, are not corrupted with Tahitian. Guy (1999b) has hypothesized that Atua Matariri, although unconnected with the particular tablet it was recited for, was perhaps a chant from a "spelling bee" describing the composition of rongorongo glyphs, which Ure Va‘eiko had overheard in his youth but not fully understood. The verses are of the form X ki ‘ai ki roto Y, ka pû te Z. When taken literally, they appear to be nonsense: "Moon by copulating with Darkness produced Sun" (verse 25, Métraux's translation), "Tail by copulating with Hina-oio produced the crayfish" (verse 27), "Stinging-fly by copulating with Swarm-of-flies produced the fly" (verse 16). However, according to Englert (1993), the particle ka which Métraux took to be the past tense is actually the imperative (the particle for past tense is ku), the phrase ki roto means "into" rather than "with", and the verb ‘ai is transitive, so that X ki ‘ai ki roto Y, ka pû te Z would be better translated as by joining X into Y, let Z come forth. Guy notes that this phrasing is similar to the way the composition of Chinese characters is described; for example, "Add 金 jīn (metal) to 同 tóng (together) to make 銅 tóng (copper)", which is also nonsense when taken literally.

Fanciful decipherments

In 1892 the Australian pediatrician Alan Carroll published a fanciful translation, based on the idea that the texts were written by an extinct "Long-Ear" population of Easter Island in a diverse mixture of Quechua and other languages of Peru and Mesoamerica. Perhaps due to 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' " (Carter 2003).

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. At that time there was no easy way to typeset rongorongo or even to identify the glyphs under discussion, so it was not apparent that several of the rongorongo glyphs used in the comparisons were spurious. 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.

A score of decipherments have been claimed since then, none of which have been accepted by other rongorongo epigraphers (Pozdniakov 1996). For instance, linguist Irina Fedorova (1995) published purported translations of the two St Petersburg tablets and portions of four others. More rigorous than most attempts, she restricts each glyph to a single reading. However, the results make little sense as texts. For example, tablet P begins with,

cut rangi sugarcane, tara yam, lots of taro, stalks (?), cut yam, harvested, cut yam, cut, pulled up, cut honui, cut sugarcane, cut, harvested, took, kihi, chose kihi, took kihi… (Pr1, as translated in Pozdniakov 1996)

and continues in this vein to the end:

harvested yam, poporo, calabash, pulled up yam, cut, cut a plant, yam, cut banana, harvested sugarcane, cut taro, cut kahu yam, yam, yam… (Pv11)

The other texts are similar: Line Ca1 of the Mamari calendar produces,

root, root, root, root, root, root [that is, a lot of roots], tuber, took, cut potato tuber, unearthed yam shoots, yam tuber, potato tuber, tuber…

Several recent scholars (for example Pozdniakov 1996, Guy 1990–2001, Sproat 2003, Horley 2005) are of the opinion that the only twentieth-century contributions toward decipherment that are likely to be of lasting value are a few much more modest proposals by Kudrjavtsev et al., Butinov and Knorozov, and Thomas Barthel.

Harrison: Name lists?

John Park Harrison (1874:379) noticed that lines r3-7 of the Small Santiago tablet G featured a compound glyph, 380.1.3 [a sitting figure (380) holding a rod (1) with a line of chevrons (3)], repeated 31 times, each time followed by one to half a dozen glyphs before its next occurrence. He believed that this broke the text into sections containing the names of chiefs. Barthel later found this pattern on tablet K, which is a paraphrase of Gr (in many of the K sequences the compound is reduced to 380.1), as well as on A, where it sometimes appears as 380.1.3 and sometimes as 380.1; on C, E, and S as 380.1; and, with the variant 380.1.52, on N. He saw 380.1 as a tangata rongorongo holding an inscribed staff like the Santiago Staff.

Kudrjavtsev et al.: The discovery of parallel texts

During World War II, a small group of students in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad), Boris Kudrjavtsev, Valerij Chernuskov, and Oleg Klitin, 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. Kudrjavtsev wrote up their findings, which were published posthumously (Kudrjavtsev 1949).

Short excerpt of the parallel text on tablets H, P, and Q

Numerous other parallel and partially parallel texts have since been identified, including statistical analyses by Sproat (2003) and Horley (2005).

Butinov & Knorozov: A genealogy on tablet G?

In 1957 the Russian epigraphers Nikolai Butinov and Yuri Knorozov suggested that the repetitive structure of a sequence of some 15 signs on Gv5-6 (lines 5 and 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, 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 and Guy: 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 1958:242ff). Guy (1990, 2001) proposed that it was more precisely an astronomical rule for whether 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, and if one, whether it should come before or after the full moon. This is the only example of rongorongo that is currently accepted as being understood, though it cannot actually be read.

In Guy's interpretation, the core of the calendar is a series (colored red in the illustration, right) of 29 crescents on either side of the full moon, a pictogram of the Cook in the Moon of Oceanic mythology. These correspond to the 28 basic and two intercalary nights of the old Rapa Nui lunar calendar.

The thirty nights are divided into eight groups, starting with the new moon, by a "heralding sequence" of four glyphs (colored purple) which end in the pictogram of a fish (yellow). The heralding sequences each contain two lunar crescents, but facing the opposite way of the crescents in the calendar proper. In all four heralding sequences preceding the full moon the fish is head up; in all four following it the fish is head down, suggesting the waxing and waning of the moon. The groups reflect the patterns of names in the old calendar. The two crescents at the end of the calendar, introduced with an expanded heralding sequence, represent the two intercalary nights held in reserve. The eleventh crescent, with the bulge, is where one of those nights is found in Thomson's and Métraux's records.

Guy notes that the further the Moon is from the Earth in its eccentric orbit, the slower it moves, and the more likely the need to resort to an intercalary night to keep the calendar in sync with its phases. He hypothesizes that the "heralding sequences" are instructions to observe the apparent diameter of the Moon, and that the half-size superscripted crescents preceding the sixth night before and sixth night aften the full moon (orange) represent the small apparent diameter at apogee which triggers intercalation. (The first small crescent corresponds to the position of hotu in Thomson and Métraux.)

Seven of the calendrical crescents (in red) are accompanied by other glyphs (in green). Guy suggests some phonetic readings for these, based on correspondences with the names of the nights in the old calendar, some of which he considers almost certain, and some quite speculative. The two sequences of six and five nights without such accompanying glyphs (beginning of line 7, and transition of lines 7-8) correspond to the numbered kokore nights, which do not have individual names.

For a glyph-by-glyph analysis as of 1998, see Guy's The Lunar Calendar of Tablet Mamari

Fischer: A corpus of procreation chants

In 1995 independent linguist Steven Fischer announced that he had cracked the rongorongo code (Bahn 1996). In the decade since, this has not been accepted by other researchers, who feel that Fischer overstated the single pattern that formed the basis of his decipherment, and note that it has not led to an understanding of other patterns (Pozdniakov 1996, Guy 1998, Robinson 2002, Sproat 2003, Horley 2005). The decipherment Fischer noticed that long text of the 1.25m Santiago Staff 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, : 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."

Similar phallic triplets are claimed for several other texts. However, in the majority of texts glyph 76 is not common, and Fischer proposes that these are a later, more developed form of the script where the creation chants are abbreviated to omit the phallus. He concludes that 85% of the rongorongo corpus consists of such creation chants (1997:107), and that it is only a matter of time before rongorongo is fully deciphered. Objections

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

• When Andrew Robinson checked the claimed pattern (Robinson 2002:241), 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)." Glyph 76 also occurs in isolation, in the 'wrong' parts of the sequence, and combined with several in a row, for example the last section of figure 2 in Fischer's on-line article, which reads 604.76-76-206.76. Other than the Staff, Pozdniakov (1996) only could find Fischer's triplets in the poorly preserved text Ta and in the single line of Gv which Butinov and Knorozov suggested might be a genealogy.
• 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 Gv becomes semantically odd, with several animate beings copulating with the same human figure to produce themselves:

A copulated with B, there issued forth A

C copulated with B, there issued forth C

D copulated with B, there issued forth D

• Computational linguist Richard Sproat (2003) could not replicate the parallels Fischer claimed between the Santiago Staff and the other texts. He automated the search for string matches between the texts and found that the staff stood alone:

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 the entire rongorongo corpus, the Russian historical linguist Konstantin Pozdniakov made two observations (Pozdniakov 1996):

1. All texts but I and G verso consist predominantly of shared longish sequences of glyphs, which occur in different contexts on different tablets. He identified some fifty such repeated sequences, and remarked that they begin and end with a notably restricted set of 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 four-fingered forked hand), 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; marine figures, such as 734 and 736; and inanimate figures, such as 65 and 132, or 84 and 56.

:

He also proposes that the heads with the 'gaping mouth', as in glyph 380 , are variant bird heads, conflating much of Barthel's 300 and 400 glyph series with his 600 series. 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 compares the frequency distributions of the syllables of the recitation Apai and of the components of the rongorongo glyphs, and sees in their close agreement evidence that rongorongo is syllabic and is consistent with the Rapanui language. Sproat (2007) suggests that this may be nothing more than an effect of Zipf's law, but Horley (2005) disagrees, stating that the number of syllables is too small for Zipf's Law to be significant (although some texts, such as large portions of Mamari both within and outside the identified calendar, do not appear to transcribe sounds, syllabic or otherwise). This is an important issue, as Butinov and Knorozov (1957), using a cruder analysis of Barthel's corpus, had concluded that the language of the texts could not be Rapanui.

Notes

External links

• Discussion by Steven Fischer, with critique by Jacques Guy
• Richard Sproat's site, with concordance of matched sequences
• Richard Sproat lecture at LSA 2007
• Draft Unicode proposal for rongorongo
• The Rock Art of Rapa Nui by Georgia Lee

References

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