© 2006 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
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Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island’s lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity.
Known as Rapa Nui to the island’s inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island’s history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.
When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhat isolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limited natural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over the following years the island’s population of four thousand or so was slowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slave traders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitants remained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strange language was too closely tied to the inhabitants’ pagan past, and forbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced the inhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.
In 1864, Father Joseph Eyraud became the first non-islander to record Rongorongo. Writing before the ultimate decline of the Eastern Island society, he noted that “one finds in all the houses wooden tables or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphs.” Despite his interest in the subject, he was not able to find an Islander willing to translate the texts. The islanders were understandably reluctant to help, given that the Europeans forcefully suppressed the use of their native writing.
Some time later, Bishop Florentin Jaussen of Tahiti attempted to translate the texts. A young Easter Islander named Metero claimed to be able to read Rongorongo, and for fifteen days the bishop kept a record while the boy dictated from the inscriptions. Bishop Jaussen gave up the effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy had assigned several meanings to the same symbol.
In 1886 Paymaster William Thompson of the ship USS Mohican became interested in the pictographic system during a journey to collect artifacts for the National Museum in Washington. He had obtained two rare tablets engraved with the script and was curious about their meaning. He asked eighty-three-year-old islander Ure Va’e Iko for assistance in translation because his age made him more likely to have knowledge of the language. The man reluctantly admitted to knowing what the tablets said, but did not wish to break the orders of the missionaries. As a result, Ure Va’e Iko refused to touch the tablets, let alone decipher them.
Thompson was determined, however, and decided that Ure Va’e Iko might be more forthcoming under the influence of alcohol. After having a few drinks kindly provided by Thompson, the Easter Islander looked at the tablets once again. The old man burst into song, singing a fertility chant which described the mating of gods and goddesses. William Thompson and his companions quickly took down his words. This was potentially a big breakthrough, but Thomson struggled with assigning words to the pictographs. Furthermore, he couldn’t find another Islander who was willing to confirm the accuracy of this translation. While Thompson was ultimately unable to read Rongorongo, the translation that Iko provided has remained one of the most valuable clues on how to decipher the tablets.
In the following decades, many scholars have attempted to make sense of this mystery. In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy tried to link Rongorongo to the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. Further examination found this link to be much more superficial than originally believed. In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel became one of the first linguists of the modern era to make a study of Rongorongo. He stated that system contained 120 basic elements that, when combined, formed 1500 different signs. Furthermore, he asserted that the symbols represented both objects and ideas. This made it more difficult to produce a translation because an individual symbol could potentially represent an entire phrase. Barthel was successful, however, in identifying an artifact known as the Mamri tablet as a lunar calendar.
Some of the most recent research has been conducted by a linguist named Steven Fischer. Having studied nearly every surviving example of Rongorongo, he took particular interest in a four-foot-long scepter that had once been the property of an Easter Island Chief. The artifact is covered in pictographs, and Fischer noticed that every third symbol on this staff has an additional “phallus-like” symbol attached to it.This led Fischer to believe that all Rongorongo texts have a structure steeped in counts of three, or triads. He has also studied Ure Va’e Iko’s fertility chant, which lent additional support to the concept. Iko had always named a god first, his goddess mate second, and their offspring third. Fischer has also tried to make the claim that all Rongorongo texts relate creation myths. Looking at another text, he has suggested that a sentence with a symbol of a bird, a fish, and a sun reads “All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun.” While this could be the translation, it bears little resemblance to Ure Va’e Iko’s chant about the matings of gods and goddesses.
Rongorongo naturally commands a great deal of interest from linguists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Only twenty-five texts are know to have survived. Should anyone find a workable translation for Rongorongo, the knowledge stored on the remaining tablets might explain the mysterious statues of Easter Island, the sudden appearance of the written language, and the island’s history and customs as whole. However, much like the statues which have so captivated popular imagination, Rongorongo has so far defied all attempts at explanation.
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Yet again something that shows how little we truly know of our own past.
Wow! Damn interesting:-)
I’m always fascinated by stories like this. Its sad to think that because of people like missionaries who were just trying to help these people, they distroyed a culture. It would be interesting to see someone figure out how to translate these tablets. Too bad all the people who spoke/read it are dead. Just another civilization lost to western ignorance.
Another source of info on this topic is a newer book called collapse by Jared diamond ( the same author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) he uses the example of easter island culture pretty extensively
Just another example of how religion helps us by suppressing knowledge and seeking to destroy what its practicioners do not understand! Thank you Elton John and Richard Dawkins for having the courage to speak the truth!
@riqie arneberg
Just a forewarning, let us keep all bashing of religion and unscientific beliefs out of the comment section for the time being. Please?
riqie arneberg said: “Just another example of how religion helps us by suppressing knowledge and seeking to destroy what its practicioners do not understand! Thank you Elton John and Richard Dawkins for having the courage to speak the truth!”
Hummm… yet throughout history, it is usually “Religion” that is responsible for history being remembered and taught. Then there were people who considered religion “bad” and either reshaped it to their desires (Hitler) or abolished it by making it illegal and destroying historical buildings, writings, histories, and artifacts (Stalin). Not to forget the wholesome slaughter of all those foolish believers.
Yep, I guess Elton John and Richard Dawkins should continue on this “righteous”… oops, excuse me, I mean staunch viewpoint of theirs. Since history is full of people with the same belief… er… viewpoint.
Phill said: “@riqie arneberg
Just a forewarning, let us keep all bashing of religion and unscientific beliefs out of the comment section for the time being. Please?”
Sorry Phill, allowed my inner thoughts override my normal avoidance of religion and politics, two camps that have no justifiable reason on these discussion/information discussions.
Radiatidon: well fucking said.
Anyway, it’s always sad to read when another language has fallen into obscurity. Still, “Westerners” have learned a lot about these people and the grave mistakes they’ve made during their lifetime on the island. Hopefully these mistakes won’t be repeated in the future.
Wow, I hadn’t expected the phrase “Rapa Nui” to drag stuff from a long unused part of my memory… but I remember seeing a movie trailer by that name. Sure enough, a trip to IMDB proves I didn’t just hallucinate it… and it is about Easter Island. Not a historical film, but “tenuously” based on what little is known about the island. Here’s the link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110944/
I do have to say, I really wish that missionaries hadn’t been so fervent in subjugating every culture they had come across. It does make sense to me that their first written language would be pictograms, as it is a lot easier to remember the meaning of something when it is a picture resembling a bit of what it represents. Too bad the context of all that was forbidden and then lost. Quite a tragedy.
Stephanie, DI article – I gotta give you props! Thank you.
Once again we find ourselves in the position of trying to recreate something we have destroyed.
Gotta hand it to us…We always think we can improve on everything. We should just keep our hands in our pockets and shut up.
Now that is what I call obscure human history…
Maybe, the inhabitants of Easter Island were drawing an ancient form of porn? Have anyone thought about that?
Very nicely done Stephanie!! Interesting and obscure. I look forward to your next article!! :)
I believe that the article is mistaken on one point. “Rapa Nui” is the name of the island, not the language. I think it’s a polynesian translation of the island’s wester-given name “easter island.” Can’t remember where I got this from, though .. so probably not very interesting.
Actually, “Rapa Nui” means “Big Rapa,” relating it to the island of Rapa, which is about 2,000 miles West of Easter Island. Some archaeologists believe that the Easter Islanders originally arrived from Rapa, although the consensus (for the most part) is that they were from the Marquesas Islands. And many linguists now believe that the Rongorongo script worked as a sort of mnemonic device to help storytellers recall complex tales, rather than being a bona fide written language. Still one hell of an achievement, though.
I think that comment represents the first time my anthropology degree has actually come in handy…
@wk2x: According to info from the loinked-to websites, “Rapa Nui” is also the name of the language, though usually it’s referred to as the “Rapanui language”.
Re-reading this again brought something up in my mind – Stephanie says the written language appears suddenly in the 1700s, and the island was “claimed” by the Spanish in 1770. Was the time that it was “discovered” synonymous with the time it was claimed? [A quick Googling tells me the Dutch stumbled upon it in 1722 and Wiki says the islanders’ story about the rongorongo tablets is that 67 of them were brought to the island by the legendary first settler and is one of three scripts of Easter Island, the others being the ta’u and Mama scripts.]
That could really be confounding any translation effort if they are trying to translate 3 different writing systems as one!
I wonder how much the U.S. paid them to build the landing strip for the space shuttle there?
Aliens! It was allllll the aliens!
(kidding)
(well, it could be though)
wk2x said: “I believe that the article is mistaken on one point. “Rapa Nui” is the name of the island, not the language. I think it’s a polynesian translation of the island’s wester-given name “easter island.” Can’t remember where I got this from, though .. so probably not very interesting.”
Actually the name “Easter Island” came about because the Dutch discovered it on Easter Sunday. The name “Rapa Nui” is Polynesian coined by a visiting 19th century Tahitian who thought the island looked like the Tahitian island of ‘Rapa’ but only bigger. The Polynesian words Rapa means “To Flash” or “To Shine” while Nui is “large” or “big”.
The natives of Easter Island call their island “Te Pito o TeHenua” which roughly translates to “The Navel of the World.”
One finial comment is that reading the script is unique. You start at the bottom left-hand corner of the tablet. Now read from left to right until you reach the end of that line. Instead of returning to the left side you turn the tablet around 180 degrees then start at the left side and read the next line. To understand better, imagine every other line of text printed upside down.
Phew… imagine turning your monitor around to read the following line of text!
Just a couple points…
First,
There was a great book, Aku Aku, written (by Thor Heyerdahl of Kon Tiki fame) which explained many of the mysteries of ‘what happened on Easter Island’ to cause its varied problems … which interestingly enough seem to be linked to the islands religious sects fighting against each other.
________________________________________________________________
Second, Religion is another fact to deal with realisticly, to dismiss its effects is to blind one eye. There is good done in the name of religion, and bad. … (To my mind the bad most often occurs when religion and politics are chummy bedfellows)
__________________________________________________________________
Well meaning individuals who follow the dictates of some hierarchial power structure can do lots of well intentioned damage, but damage nonetheless. ……
And to expect anyone to obey without questioning is the hallmark of a brainwashing cult (to question is to defy god) [small letter intentional]; you decide if your group fits that definition, k?
“All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun.” Umm..its quite obvious this refers to the sun rising from the ocean to the sky…
DI article.
Nice work!¡!¡!¡!¡
Osmanthus said: “”All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun.” Umm..its quite obvious this refers to the sun rising from the ocean to the sky…”
‘Obvious’ is not a sensible word nor concept to use when dealing with an unverifiable translation. You may well be right, but you’re mislabelling educated guesses as facts.
One finial comment is that reading the script is unique. … Instead of returning to the left side you turn the tablet around 180 degrees then start at the left side and read the next line.
The very ancient Greeks did something a bit like this as an intermediate step between right-to-left Phonecian and classical and modern left-to-right Greek. They went in alternate directions but, rather than writing upside down, used mirror writing (compared with modern script) on the right-to-left lines.
http://www.ancientscripts.com/greek.html
…next time I pass a Barnes & Noble or other mall book store, I’ll check to see if they have an English to Rongorongo or Rongorongo to English dictionary. Perhaps Webster has already completed such legwork and then we can look this stuff up (NOT). Otherwise, anyone know a good cryptographer?
The Eastern Island mystery can be explained if one reads Zecharia Sitchin’s “The Lost Realms” the fourth book of The Earth Chronicles. “Arthur Posansky (Guia general Illustrada de Tiahuanacu) found additional inscriptions in this script on rocks on the two sacred islands of Lake Titicaca. He pointed out that it was of a kind with enigmatic inscriptions found on Easter Island, a conclusion with which scholars now generally agree.
But the Easter Island script is known to belong to the family of Indo-European scripts of the Indus Valley and of the Hittites. A common feature to all of them (including the Lake Titicaca inscriptions) is their “as the ox ploughs” system: the writing on the first line begins on the left and ends on the right; it continues on the second line beginning on the right, ending on the left; the third line then begins on the left, and so on.”
Very interesting.
Anyways, I found this exact same article at http://unexplained-mysteries.com/viewnews.php?id=85017
but then realized that the source was from DI.
The Easter Island script has no relation to the Indus Valley. No proof for this at all.
phiroc said: “The Eastern Island mystery can be explained if one reads Zecharia Sitchin’s “The Lost Realms” the fourth book of The Earth Chronicles. “Arthur Posansky (Guia general Illustrada de Tiahuanacu) found additional inscriptions in this script on rocks on the two sacred islands of Lake Titicaca. He pointed out that it was of a kind with enigmatic inscriptions found on Easter Island, a conclusion with which scholars now generally agree.
But the Easter Island script is known to belong to the family of Indo-European scripts of the Indus Valley and of the Hittites. A common feature to all of them (including the Lake Titicaca inscriptions) is their “as the ox ploughs” system: the writing on the first line begins on the left and ends on the right; it continues on the second line beginning on the right, ending on the left; the third line then begins on the left, and so on.””
Zecharia Sitchin thinks that Aliens created humanity right?
I urge anyone who is interested in ancient cultures to first reference the works of reputable, peer reviewed, archeology or at least be familiar with it. It’ll help, trust me.
I must have missed what the first mystery was . . .
What’s so mysterious about the statues? Jared Diamond describes them in detail as basically being gigantic pieces of conspicuous consumption intended to show off the power of local leaders, and he also describes how they were made, transported, and erected (as demonstrated by the islanders themselves). Okay, so the culture’s been destroyed and we’re surely missing some nuances about the mythology behind the statues, but why do people consider this a big mystery?
I thought we had puter programs that could crack codes, and translate symbols into words. So why can’t something like that be used to figure out these “lost n found languages?
Aside from that, I wonder if these were a geneology concidering the pattern of a similar symbol being the every third one? And a calender being part of it all.
Example: So-n-So begat So-n-So, …I can see a peoples trying to record their liniage for future generations out of the fear of historical extinction by the missionarys and their wisdom.
” Praise be we got Baptised and our culture sterilized all at the same time! Now we got us a get out of hell free card and can forget our carefree heathan ways, and spend the rest of our lives here on earth living in fear of provokeing this new “benevolent” being into withdrawing the blessing for some small infraction and frying us eternaly in a pit of molten lava.”
Yep, thats love for ya.
Tink, computers can only do what a person has been smart enough to tell it how to do it in the first place. Granted the computers can do it millions of times faster usually, so a lot of bute force elimination techniques can be employed, but there is no intuition or leaps in understanding with a program. That and no one has got a good translation program to effectively translate poetry yet, and they usually know what words in the pre-encoded language are to start with!
BTW, love your sense of humour there.
Drakvil said: “Tink, computers can only do what a person has been smart enough to tell it how to do it in the first place. Granted the computers can do it millions of times faster usually, so a lot of bute force elimination techniques can be employed, but there is no intuition or leaps in understanding with a program. That and no one has got a good translation program to effectively translate poetry yet, and they usually know what words in the pre-encoded language are to start with!
BTW, love your sense of humour there.”
Thank you Drakvil, your a doll! :)
“Bishop Jaussen gave up the effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy had assigned several meanings to the same symbol.”
Why does assigning several meanings to the same symbol prove the boy was fraud? Couldn’t the same symbol have several meanings, like an English word might mean different things in different contexts (like “right”)? Especially since later on the article, it is written “Furthermore, he asserted that the symbols represented both objects and ideas. This made it more difficult to produce a translation because an individual symbol could potentially represent an entire phrase.” If a symbol could represent an entire phrase, it could definitely represent a word, which as mentioned above could take on several meanings.
Maybe Bishop Jaussen could have saved us the trouble of deciphering this intriguing language.
Why does assigning several meanings to the same symbol prove the boy was fraud? Couldn’t the same symbol have several meanings, like an English word might mean different things in different contexts (like “right”)? “
The major reason Metero was written off as a fraud was that one of the meanings he assigned to a symbol was “porcelain”, and that material did not exist on the island – how could the islanders have a word for a substance they had never been exposed to (at the time the engravings were made)? Add that to inconsistently giving differing meanings to the same symbol without a context to explain the difference and you can easily reach the fraud conclusion.
Drakvil said: “The major reason Metero was written off as a fraud was that one of the meanings he assigned to a symbol was “porcelain”, and that material did not exist on the island – how could the islanders have a word for a substance they had never been exposed to (at the time the engravings were made)? Add that to inconsistently giving differing meanings to the same symbol without a context to explain the difference and you can easily reach the fraud conclusion.”
This explanation makes more sense than the one given in the article, but now I have another question. How did Metero, the “young Easter Islander”, know about porcelain?
Can’t decipher the ancient texts???
“Shaka! When the walls fell!”
agooga said: “Can’t decipher the ancient texts???
“Shaka! When the walls fell!””
LOL:
Shaka!
Rapa Nui hid when forbidden.
Missionaries death to words.
Jaussen and Metero attempted! Then the failure.
Metero discovered in deception.
Alas,Rongorongo lost eternal. ;) ?
Psy : some interesting ideas. some need more exploring . the language is older than the 1700’s suggested. you might like to look up work of Dr Georgia Lee who ran a UREP expedition to the island to study rock art. also try this connection”the caroline islands script” done in 1930’s to 1950’s. Best yet, go as I did and change your life.
I am used to seeing stupidities upon stupidities spouted about Easter Island, and this article takes the prize so far. And no, I will not waste my time enumerating the stupidities therein. There is an infinite supply of ignoramuses, and life is far too short to be wasted trying to educate them. I just suggest that you change “Damn Interesting” to “Damn Bullshit.”
And no, I will not waste my time enumerating the stupidities therein.
Thanks for the input Jacques, I can only hope that one day I’ll be as clever and knowledgable as you so obviously are.
Jacques B.M. Guy said: “There is an infinite supply of ignoramuses, and life is far too short to be wasted trying to educate them.”
Spoken like a true “insider”, Jacques. Good luck in your attempts to become educated–though you are certainly off to a bad start!
The picutre of the Rongorongo text reads as follows:
1.) Milk
2.) Eggs
3.) Sugar
4.) Those little festive umbrellas that go in drinks
***DONT FORGET THE COUPONS THIS TIME***
What is so stupid about this article? It’s for entertainment value, if you’re not entertained go suck a dick bitch and don’t come back! I liked the article personally.
Fantastic island that Rapa Nui, but unfortunately it is not as isolated as it once was. Thousands of punks gather on the island and crowds go to visit the moai.
Tourism will probably be the one to destroy Easter Island.
http://www.easterislandquest.com
An interesting point. Perhaps the difficulty lies not in interpreting the symbols but in interpreting the way they are used. Bizarre grammar, references to a culture we don’t understand, that sort of thing. Also I was delighted to recognise the reference.
Fucking missionaries, destroyers of culture and history.
Way to make this world a better place folks.
30,000 year old language from Atlantis (=Antarctica)(see: Plato) and came from Indus Valley Culture (Mohenjo Daro and Harappa) and Jordan Valley Culture (Sodom and Gomorrah= Dead sea) is now Tell al Amarna. All was NUCLEAR destroyed in a world war between Atlantis and the rest of the planet under lead of the Jordan Valley Culture. (see: Plato and Solon). The Indus Valley Culture is still RADIO ACTIVE!!
!