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RONGORONGO
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The Easter Island Tablets

by Jacques B.M. Guy

Overview

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and
with its unique writing system (known as Rongorongo), has provided
such fertile breeding ground for various crackpot theories, from
sunken continents to alien visitors, that a short introduction is
necessary.

_CAPTION:_ _Rongorongo Tablet_

Easter Islanders are of Polynesian descent, and archaeologists concur
to date their arrival around 400 AD. The island was stripped bare of
timber by the eighteenth century. Yet in a letter dated December 1864,
Brother Eugene Eyraud mentions the existence of hundreds of wooden
tablets covered in hieroglyphics. Four years later, Monsignor Jaussen,
Bishop of Tahiti, could only recover five tablets. Only twentyone have
survived, scattered in museums and private collections. The writing on
them is extraordinary. Tiny, remarkably regular glyphs, about one
centimeter high, highly stylized and formalized, are carved in shallow
grooves running the length of the tablets. Oral tradition has it that
scribes used obsidian flakes or shark teeth to cut the glyphs and that
writing was brought by the first colonists led by Hotu Matua. Last but
not least, of the twentyone surviving tablets [1]three bear the same
text in slightly different "spellings", a fact discovered by three
schoolboys of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), just before World War
II. In 1958 Thomas Barthel made the whole of the Easter Island corpus
available in his "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift"
("Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script"), alas never
translated into English. Almost forty years later now the tablets
remain as much of an enigma. Their meaning remains unknown, except for
two and a half lines of one tablet, which, beyond reasonable doubt,
contain a [2]lunar calendar, already identified as such by Barthel in
1958.

The Discovery of the Tablets

Let us wind the story back to the discovery of the first tablet. I can
do no better than quote the excellent little book by Catherine and
Michel Orliac, "Des dieux regardent les étoiles" ("Gods gaze at the
stars", No.38 in Gallimard's paperback series "Découvertes"):

"In 1868 newly converted Easter Islanders send to Tepano Jaussen,
Bishop of Tahiti, as a token of respect, a long twine of human hair,
wound around an ancient piece of wood. Tepano Jaussen examines the
gift, and, lifting the twine, discovers that the small board is
covered in hieroglyphs."

The bishop, elated at the discovery, writes to Father Hippolyte
Roussel on Easter Island, exhorting him to gather all the tablets he
can and to seek out natives able to translate them. But only a handful
remain of the hundreds of tablets mentioned by Brother Eyraud only a
few years earlier in a report to the Father Superior of the
Congregation of the Sacred Heart. Some say they were burnt to please
the missionaries who saw in them evil relics of pagan times. Some say
they were hidden to save them from destruction. Which side should we
believe? Brother Eyraud had died in 1868 without having ever mentioned
the tablets to anyone else, not even to his friend Father Zumbohm, who
is astounded at the bishop's discovery. Monsignor Jaussen soon locates
in Tahiti a laborer from Easter Island, Metoro, who claims to be able
to read the tablets. He describes in his notes how Metoro turns each
tablet around and around to find its beginning, then starts chanting
its contents. The direction of writing is unique. Starting from the
lefthand bottom corner, you proceed from left to right and, at the end
of the line, you turn the tablet around before you start reading the
next line. Indeed, the orientation of the hieroglyphs is reversed
every other line. Imagine a book in which every other line is printed
backtofront and upsidedown. That is how the tablets are written!

Jaussen's Attempt at Decipherment

Mgr Jaussen sits down to the daunting task of writing down Metoro's
reading of four tablets in his possession.

He is soon disappointed. Metoro's chanting makes little sense: "He is
pierced. It is the king. He went to the water. The man is sleeping
against blossoming fruit. The posts are set up..." But Mgr Jaussen
does not abandon hope and the chants which he patiently writes down,
with comments and the corresponding hieroglyphs, will occupy some 230
pages out of the 300 of his notes. This manuscript, alas, was never to
be published: the reproduction of the hieroglyphs would have cost far
too much. Whereas nowadays.... is there an interested publisher
reading this?

Only a list of a few hundred hieroglyphs will ever be published. It is
the famous "[3]JAUSSEN LIST" which has been the basis of many an
unsuccessful attempt at decipherment.

Thomas Barthel

Suddenly, in 1958, extraordinary news! In an article of the June issue
of Scientific American, entitled "The 'Talking Boards' of Easter
Island", a German cryptologist, Thomas Barthel, claims success. But he
only gives an overview of the writing system with a short list of
signs, their pronunciation and meaning. The much awaited translation
of the tablets does not materialize. Scholars become impatient. In the
February 1964 issue of "The American Anthropologist", Mulloy,
Skjølsvold and Smith demand of Barthel that he present the translation
of at least one tablet. Nothing. A shame, for Barthel had done an
excellent job with his "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der
Osterinselschrift". He has invented a numerical code to reference most
of the signs and their combinations. He has identified two and a half
lines of one tablet which, beyond the shadow of a doubt, contain a
[4]lunar calendar. He has included in his book faithful line
reproductions of the hieroglyphic text of all the tablets, much easier
to use and study than photographs. How come, then, that he was unable
to produce the much touted decipherment?

Metoro's Chants

Barthel's Rosetta Stone had been Jaussen's records of Metoro's chants.
If you take even only a cursory look at the "[5]JAUSSEN LIST", you
soon realize that Metoro was only describing what he saw, a bit as if
you showed me the word "shown", and if I were to blather away: "hook
(s) in the back of a seat (h) with a hole (o) in it and a pair of
buttocks (w), trousers down (n)". Upon which evidence you would set
out to decipher Shakespeare's sonnets.

Is everything from Metoro to be rejected then? Not necessarily.
Perhaps Metoro knew only how to "spell out" the hieroglyphs without
knowing how to pronounce them, nor what they meant. Just as if, upon
being shown the word "cat" you said: "cee, ay, tee", without knowing
what it means and how to say it. That would neatly explain why, as
reported by some anthropologists, the same informant would read the
same tabletdifferently from day to day. Do we not ourselves vary in
our spelling usage? We say "capital C" or "uppercase C", we say "zero"
or "oh". Americans say "zee", Britons say "zed". Britons say "double
ell", Americans "ell, ell". It would also explain how anthropologists
reported having substituted a photo of a tablet for another in mid­
recitation without their informant being in the least frazzled. If you
are merely calling out a text, letter by letter (or hieroglyph by
hieroglyph), it does not matter what it is, even what language it is
in, as long as the alphabet is the same on every page you are shown.

Other Attempts at Decipherment

There have been too many for me to mention them all here. Two will
have to do.

Carroll's Decipherment.

In 1892 the Journal of the Polynesian Society published a decipherment
by Dr Carroll, a Sydney (Australia) medical doctor, which read very
much like H. Rider Haggard's famous novel "She" transported to the
Andes: American Indians of the Inca Empire, complete with a priestess,
fleeing erupting volcanoes and sundry catastrophes, to end up on
Easter Island. The story ran for two issues of the Journal, and, when
asked to explain how he had arrived at his translation, and to bring
evidence such as lists of hieroglyphs with their meanings, the good
doctor seems to have retreated to his Sydney surgery never to be heard
of again. Embarrassed silence was then heard from the Journal.

Fischer's Decipherment.

In 1995 the Journal of the Polynesian Society published an article by
Dr Fischer, where he claimed to have identified the nature of the
tablets. They are chants, he says, of the form "Soandso copulated with
Soandso begetting Suchandsuch". Since the announcement of this
decipherment has been widely disseminated, from the international
tabloid press such as VSD in France to even such a highbrow scientific
journal as Nature (18 January 1996 issue), Fischer's claims deserve to
be examined a bit more closely than Carroll's.

Fischer's Claim.

Fischer has observed that there is a very strong tendency for every
third sign on the tablet known as the Santiago Staff to comprise an
appendage which he calls a "phallic suffix" (outlined in black and
filled in in yellow in the illustration below). He interprets this
appendage as a phallus after Thomas Barthel, who himself bases his
evidence on Metoro's reading of one hieroglyph as "man with the erect
penis" (tangata ure huki). He concludes that there is a clear ternary
pattern repeated throughout the Santiago Staff:

1. some sign with a phallus followed by
2. some other sign without a phallus followed by
3. some other sign again without a phallus

_CAPTION:_ _Santiago Staff _

Now, in 1886, an enlightened amateur, William Thomson, stayed 11 days
on Easter Island during which he collected a wealth of reliable,
excellently reported material worthy of the best professionals. Among
that material was a recitation, known as "[6]Atua Mata Riri" (God
Angry Eyes), after its opening words. It consists of 48 verses, 41 of
which tell of suchandsuch a god copulating with suchandsuch a goddess,
from whose union springs suchandsuch an animal, plant, or natural
phenomenon. Fischer jumps onto the similarity, and concludes without
further ado that the first sign of each group of three, the one with a
"phallus", is the copulator, the second one the... if I may coin this
horrible word, the copulatee, and the third one the offspring. But,
firstly, Fischer proposes no decipherment of any part of the Santiago
Staff that reads even remotely like any of the 41 verses of "[7]Atua
Mata Riri". Secondly, he does propose a decipherment of three signs,
but this decipherment is from the linguistic point of view at once a
barbarism and a solecism, and from the cultural point of view it is so
incompatible with Polynesian oral literature as to be unbelievable.

Fischer's Only Proposed Decipherment

This is: "te manu mau ki 'ai ki roto ki te ika, ka puu te ra'aa" which
Fischer translates: "all the birds copulated with the fish, there
issued forth the sun". (te: the, manu: bird, mau: all, ki 'ai:
copulated, ki roto ki: inside, ika: fish, ka puu: sprang, te: the,
ra'aa: sun).

First, this story occurs nowhere in Easter Island nor in Polynesian
mythologies, as Fischer himself admits. Second, birds copulating with
fish are alien to Easter Island and Polynesian lore, where creators
and genitors are gods and goddesses and cultural heroes, not mere
animals. Third, "mau" is nowhere attested in the Easter Island
language with the meaning "all", but it is a plural marker borrowed
from Tahitian, and as such it always precedes the noun (thus one would
say "te mau manu", "the birds", not "te manu mau", which means "true
bird" or "bird proper" in Tahitian).

Fischer's Lack of Method

Readers familiar with logic will have spotted in Fischer's claimed
decipherment the fundamental flaw of reasoning called the fallacy of
the excluded middle: dogs have four legs, tables have four legs;
therefore tables, like dogs, wag their tails and pee against trees.
Likewise the Santiago Staff has signs in groups of three, the
recitation has protagonists in groups of three; therefore the Santiago
Staff, like "[8]Atua Mata Riri", is a story of how animals, plants and
natural phenomena came into existence.

Fischer's lack of method does not stop there. In another article,
published in the Rapa Nui Journal, he claims to have identified
similar copulation stories on "eleven other tablets, _all of them
lacking the phallic suffix_
" (my emphasis). In other words, wherever he did not see a phallus, he
supplied one.

What Then, Do We Know?

Very little. We will probably never know what the tablets mean: too
few have survived. Let us then be content with the little of which we
can be sure.

Each tablet was prepared before carving. Shallow grooves were cut
lengthwise, probably using an adze with a blade of shell or of
obsidian. They are 10 to 15mm wide, and can be clearly seen in a photo
pp.6465 of Catherine and Michel Orliac's excellent little book. The
signs themselves were engraved in those grooves, probably with shark
teeth or obsidian flakes, as oral tradition has it.

Of the 21 tablets we have, [9]three bear almost exactly the same
hieroglyphic text. A fourth one, called "[10]Tahua" or "The Oar" bears
only part of that text, and in a very different, more lapidary, style.
Indeed this tablet is an oar made of European ash, as were used in the
British navy two centuries ago. At the earliest, it could date from
the beginning of the eighteenth century, at the latest, from the end
of the nineteenth. There must therefore have been then literate Easter
Islanders, because this "Oar" is not a mere copy. It looks like a
compilation, a digest of earlier texts, lost, except for its
beginning, found on those other three tablets (see "On a Fragment of
the [11]Tahua Tablet" in the Journal of the Polynesian Society,
December 1985).

The overwhelming majority of the hieroglyphs are anthropomorphic. They
are little figures, facing you, or sideways; standing with dangling
arms; or sitting with their legs sometimes stretched, sometimes
crossed; with a hand up, or down, or turned to the mouth; some hold a
staff, some a shield, some a barbed string. Some sport two bulging
eyes (or are they ears, or coils of hair?); some a huge hooked nose
with three hairs on it; some have the body of a bird. The writing
often looks like an animated cartoon. You can see the same little
fellow repeated in slightly different postures. One tablet shows the
same figure in three successive postures, sitting sideways, playing,
it seems, with a top. Or is it a potter at the wheel? A jeweller with
a drill, making shell beads?

There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds especially, fish and
lizards less often. The most frequent figure looks very much like the
frigate bird, which happens to have been the object of a cult, as it
was associated with MakeMake, the supreme god.

When you compare the tablets which bear the same text, when you
analyze repeated groups of signs, you realize that writing must have
followed rules. The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next,
but not in any old way. You could either carve a mannikin standing,
arms dangling, followed by some other sign, or the same mannikin
holding that sign with one hand. You could either carve a simple sign
(a leg, a crescent) separate from the next, or rotate it 90 degrees
counterclockwise and carve the next sign on top of it.

All we can reasonably hope to decipher some day is some two to three
lines of the tablet commonly called "[12]Mamari". You can clearly see
that they have to do with the moon. We happen to have several versions
of the ancient lunar calendar of Easter Island. The most interesting
was collected by William Thomson in 1886, whose report was published
by the American National Museum in 1889, in a monograph "Te Pito te
Henua, or Easter Island". Thanks to Thomson, we know for instance that
the night called "kokore tahi" corresponded to 27 November 1886. Using
an almanac of 1886 or astronomical software, we can match his list
against the actual phases of the moon at the time of his stay on
Easter Island, and use this comparison as a key to deciphering the
hieroglyphs of the calendar (see "[13] The lunar calendar of Tablet
Mamari", Journal de la Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1990). Thomson
also collected the names of the months with the corresponding dates in
our calendar. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, the traditional
Easter Island year corresponding to 18851886 happened to have 13
months, whereas all other authors reported only 12 months. By
calculating the dates of the phases of the moon in 1885 and 1886 we
can reconstruct this ancient calendar and, to a certain extent, how it
worked, and when the extra month ("embolismic month" in technical
jargon) had to be inserted (see "A propos des mois de l'ancien
calendrier pascuan", Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1992). Some day,
perhaps, someone will discover a tablet the hieroglyphs of which are
the names of the months, or which contains the rules for deciding when
this thirteenth embolismic month was to be inserted.

I have mentioned failed attempts at decipherment. Many have claimed
that the Easter Island hieroglyphs are the spit image of the writing
of this or that extinct civilization, from India to the Andes, and
made the Easter Islanders their descendants. First, this is untrue.
The Easter Island hieroglyphs have a distinct style, unique in the
world. Second, this is downright silly. There are not a million
different ways of drawing a "mannikin standing", a "fish", a "staff",
a "bow", an "arrow". Ask a fouryear old to draw you a "man with a
stick" and compare that with the hieroglyphs of Easter Island. You are
sure to find a few that look very much like that "man with a stick".
Does that make the child an heir to the ancient Easter Islanders?

_About the author:
Jacques Guy studied Chinese, Japanese and Tahitian at the Ecole
Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris and obtained a
Ph.D. in linguistics from the Australian National University in
Canberra on a then unknown language of Espiritu Santo. Having long
redirected his interests to computer science and statistics he has now
been for more than ten years a senior scientist in artifical
intelligence with the Research Laboratories of Telstra (TELecom
auSTRAlia). His main lines of interest are the processing and analysis
of raw data considered as a corpus of texts of unknown meaning in an
unknown language, and the quantitative properties of information and
its transmission._
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___OTHER LINKS_

_[14]Easter Island's Rongorongo Script
[15]RongoRongo Home Page
[16]Lonely Planet's Rongorongo page.
[17]Les Tablettes de l'Ile de Pâques 
[18]Ancient Scripts of the World
[19]Easter Island Home Page. _

References

1. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/hpqa.html
2. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html
3. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/jaussen.html
4. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html
5. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/jaussen.html
6. file://localhost/www/sat/files/matariri.html
7. file://localhost/www/sat/files/matariri.html
8. file://localhost/www/sat/files/matariri.html
9. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/hpqa.html
10. file://localhost/www/sat/files/tahua.gif
11. file://localhost/www/sat/files/tahua.gif
12. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html
13. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/mamari.html
14. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/fischer.html
15. http://www.kuban.ru/users/Rjabchikov/index.htm
16. http://www.lonelyplanet.com.au/dest/sam/chi3.htm
17. http://wwwcae.cern.ch/coope/infos/presse/Frogmag/Mag03.html#4
18. http://rabbitmoon.home.mindspring.com/asw/
19. http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html