Jacob Mikanowski at Cabinet Magazine presents a fascinating look at a mysterious script whose key was lost in frustratingly recent times:
Of all the literatures in the world, the smallest and most enigmatic belongs without question to the people of Easter Island. It is written in a script—rongorongo—that no one can decipher. Experts cannot even agree whether it is an alphabet, a syllabary, a mnemonic, or a rebus. Its entire corpus consists of two dozen texts. The longest, consisting of a few thousand signs, winds its way around a magnificent ceremonial staff. The shortest texts—if they can even be called that—consist of barely more than a single sign. One took the form of a tattoo on a man’s back. Another was carved onto a human skull.
Where did the rongorongo script come from? What do its texts communicate? No one knows for sure. The last Easter Islanders (or Rapanui) familiar with rongorongo died in the nineteenth century. They didn’t live long enough to pass on the secret of their writing system, but they did leave a few tantalizing clues. The island’s spoken language, also called Rapanui, lives on, but today it is written in a Latin script and its relationship to rongorongo is unclear. So far at least, no one has successfully connected one with the other. To this day, rongorongo remains a puzzle, an enigma, and a mirror for the folly of those who try to solve it. […]
The glyphs of rongorongo are unique. So is the manner in which it was written and read. In fact, it was not written, but carved. Its scribes used shark’s teeth to inscribe its symbols on wooden tablets. Wood is scarce on Easter Island, and most of these inscriptions were made on pieces of driftwood. One decorated an oar. A second, a beam. A third, a statue of a bird. However, most of the surviving examples of rongorongo decorate square tablets. These appear to have been written from bottom to top, and were read following a pattern called the reverse boustrophedon. Boustrophedon is a Greek word meaning “in the manner of an ox,” and scripts written in it move like an ox plowing a field, reversing direction with each line.
How did the Rapanui go from signing their names to a bogus document of annexation with simple drawings to creating a complex writing system incorporating hundreds of signs? We will most likely never know. First contact with Europeans was a trauma, one to which the Rapanui responded with incredible creativity and cultural ferment. But peering into the history of how this happened is unfortunately almost impossible, for it means looking through the scrim drawn by a holocaust. […]
The process of fantastical translation began early, with one Dr. Allen Carroll, a Sydney physician who may have been the illegitimate son of the Duke of Norfolk and who believed the tablets to be the work of pre-Inca South Americans. Carroll’s translations take the form of fulsome paeans to unnamed gods, and sound a bit like bowdlerized versions of the rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “To those who are our Guardians, oh give ear to us in your temple. You are our protectors. … Ye gods.”
Carroll was the father of the so-called “rongorongo fringe.” Many more followed in his footsteps. Most share a single, driving idea: the conviction that the Rapanui could not have invented their script on their own. The islanders’ writing was necessarily the mark of an older, greater civilization, they believed. All agreed it must have come from somewhere else. Where exactly it came from was the only thing left to debate. […]
The most sustained effort to decipher rongorongo rooted in professional linguistics took place in St. Petersburg. The dogged work of the Russian school helped to sort the script into a clear inventory of signs. Through the use of internal analysis and statistical comparison, its members hoped to place the study of the script on a firm scientific basis. But their careful analysis yields results that nonetheless sound insane—in Irina Fedorova’s translation, one text ends: “yam, yam, taro, taro, he cut a tuber of yam, he took a tuber of taro, a tuber, a tuber, he dug up, he cut, he cut, taro, turi sugar-cane.”
I have elided a bunch of crackpot attempted decipherments (compare the endless Voynich nonsense) and will send you to the link for them, as well as for the remarkable story of Katherine Routledge, who gathered ethnographic data in 1914 from some of the few Rapanui elders who survived the holocaust of the 1860s and eventually went mad, and much else. Thanks, Trevor!
He’s being too kind to Fischer. True, Fischer has done some very thorough historical research on rongorongo, and when published, his book was the most detailed treatment available for things like rongorongo traditions and tablet provenance. However, his purported readings of the tablets are as obviously fanciful as those of his many predecessors quoted in the article.
A number of people have done valuable work on the script, before and after Fischer: Barthel, Guy, Pozdniakov, Horley, Wieczorek, and others. So far, the only trustworthy results are still at the level of comparing parallel passages, defining the sign inventory, and the like. Even the most cautious claims of identifying the meaning of any individual glyph are too speculative to be convincing.
Thanks, I was hoping somebody who knew more than I would comment!
yam, yam, taro, taro, he cut a tuber of yam, he took a tuber of taro, a tuber, a tuber, he dug up, he cut, he cut, taro, turi sugar-cane
Let me fix the formatting.
yam, yam,
taro, taro,
he cut a tuber of yam,
he took a tuber of taro,
a tuber, a tuber,
he dug up,
he cut, he cut,
taro, turi
sugar-cane
Even in English translation this chant has a rhyme and a rhythm, the meaning and purpose are pretty straightforward too. (the writer wants gods to grant better harvest this year and hopes to achieve this result by reciting some folk song about mythical heroes of the past. Classical Polynesian magical thinking)
Well, Fischer did also “decipher” the Phaistos Disk.
Yeah, superficially at least, that “translation” evokes old Māori waiata to me too.
Example: http://www.folksong.org.nz/toia_mai/index.html
Lots of repetition, allusion, and ellipsis in that style. So while clearly we have no insight into the soundness of methods and whether this is in fact a genuine translation, it’s not actually “insane”.
The “repetitiveness” of the Māori chant is typical for work songs, marine and otherwise (“Yo, ho, up she rises” etc.) The “yam, yam, taro, taro” thing fits no known genre, at least not one that Fedorova demonstrated.
Most or all of the bad RR interpretations go like this: squint, until you imagine the different glyphs remind you of various concrete objects. As needed, imagine that the glyphs that look like hands are engaged in some actions; those will be your verbs. Combine them all into a text. Handwave away the lacjk of grammatical morphemes of any kind; a good excuse is that wood was precious, so they wrote in telegraphic, grammar-free style to conserve space. String your words along, and fill in the translation with whatever grammar will stick the pieces together.
In the end you’ll get a chant, a prayer, or even a genealogy. It won’t make any sense, because the Polynesians were mysterious like that.
Quite a bit of the Rongorongo corpus consists of long strings of short phrases, similar but not identical. They could be lists of names, or genealogies, or something else. Nobody knows. It is those “lists” which provide the most fertile ground to imaginary translations.
The “yam yam” sounds like that thing Google Translate does on one through thirty repeated copies of a single letter.
The “yam yam” sounds pretty much exactly like a viral pop song to me, of the kind intended for dance clubs. I can all but hear the underlying techno beat. “Sugar cane!” is sang in a high-pitched female voice as the chorus.
@Y and others: I’m most curious about the question of origin—is it credible that it may be truly autochthonous, without stimulus diffusion from abroad?
The quoted passage seems to say that it was part of a cultural transformation in response to the arrival of Europeans.
What language could it be? It’s either Polynesian or (following Heyerdahl) some South American language. That’s a fairly small set of possibilities.
The concept of writing most likely came from Europeans because the Polynesians didn’t have writing and the South Americans only had knotted string. So more likely it must be from the early European contact period.
If Polynesians suddenly invented writing, what would they write? We know they liked chanting, genealogies and mythological and historical stories. If the writing has a lot of repetition, it’s probably one of the first two possibilities. Everyone wants it to be some kind of history where we could find out the real story about the Longears and the Shortears and who cut down the last tree.
I suspect that either “yam yam” or “son of so-and-so” are the most likely results if anyone succeeds in deciphering it. I kind of favour the genealogy idea because why would anyone write down chants that everybody knows? But genealogy, that’s a family thing that needs to be preserved in these hectic times.
Grammatical morphemes weren’t written in Old Chinese either. They have to be reconstructed from characters that have two pronunciations and two meanings nowadays.
Indeed, as long as a script is pictographic enough, grammatical morphemes that don’t have an easily drawable meaning can’t be drawn in the first place… the trick of using pictures for homophones is a later step, and the trick of making signs up probably comes even later.
Didn’t the Cherokee do that pretty much immediately? Or am I confusing them with the Cree? Also, if writing is for solemn occasions (as the passing Spaniards may have demonstrated), rather write down something really important if wood is scarce.
Allegedly the Spaniards. The speed of this whole “end of the world as we know it” seems to have been overinterpreted.
Yam, yam, taro, taro, fendi, fendi, prada / basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother. I’ll show myself out…
Me, I was thinking of badger badger mushroom.
Yam taro tethera.
Did any of the scholars who sought to decipher Rongorongo have any serious knowledge of comparative Polynesian linguistics? My understanding is that Modern Rapanui is heavily influenced by Tahitian and thus quite unlike what Rapanui must have been like when Rongorongo was actively used. Furthermore, if the script was used to represent a sacred register of some kind, then the gap between this “Rongorongo Rapanui” and the present-day language may be quite pronounced, So much so that it seems to me that any serious attempt at deciphering Rongorongo must take comparative Polynesian linguistics as a starting point, reconstructing early Rapanui in order to focus upon the script itself.
Also, on the origin of the script: within the article it is taken for granted that this was due to the diffusion of the idea of writing as a result of contact with the first Spanish expedition. The WP article on the script, however, points to the fact that other instances of diffusion involved much closer and longer-lasting contact. I wonder: could the trigger for the birth of Rongorongo have been something other/more than the first Spanish expedition? A single castaway literate European sailor, stuck on the islands for years if not decades, could very well have been the real catalyst.
If contact with Spanish writing was what prompted Rongorongo’s creation, shouldn’t it also be an alphabetic script (or at least a syllabary)? Are there any examples of a culture being in contact with alphabetic writing and coming up with a logographic system for themselves?
Cherokee has a syllabary, the creation of which was sparked off by Sequoiah’s encounter with the Latin alphabet. Apparently he couldn’t read the alphabet as such, and created his syllabary de novo once he discovered that written symbols could represent language.
“Are there any examples of a culture being in contact with alphabetic writing and coming up with a logographic system for themselves?”
It’s not uncommon for specialist writing in cultures with alphabetic scripts: hobo signs, military symbols, and so on.
maidhc: Pace Heyerdahl (and others), there’s no evidence for any prehistoric South American presence on Rapanui, linguistic, cultural, or genetic. The language of rongorongo would have been an ancestor of modern Rapanui.
Etienne: Kieviet’s recent comprehensive Rapanui grammar estimates that about 10% of the total vocabulary in his database is of Tahitian origin. However, he says, even though Tahitian influence on the language started in the 1880s, recorded texts don’t show much Tahitian vocabulary until the 1920s. So there’s a fair amount of record of pre-Tahitian Rapanui. In any case, Rapanui grammar and phonology remained distinct from those of Tahitian even post-contact.
In the early 19th century many European and American boats stopped by the island for very brief trade visits. If there were any castaways, they wouldn’t be there for long. I haven’t read of any in the early period, and I would suppose that if there were, their story would be well-publicized.
Of course there was an elevated register in Rapanui, as in other languages. A little of it remains in some traditional texts. But even in languages where the elevated register is well documented (e.g. Hawaiian and Tuamotuan), it is not that alien, though it relies a lot on esoteric metaphor.
David M: Any thoughts as to why early Chinese omitted grammatical morphemes? Did it have anything to do with the logographic nature of the script? Rongorongo, whatever it is, is not logographic. A good guess is that it’s a mixed syllabic script (a few dozen frequent signs, with a scattering of others).
There’s no decisive answer as to whether Rongorongo existed before European contact. There are reasonable but weak arguments both for and against. Only one tablet was carbon-dated, and it is of 19th century age.
The Europeans could have shown the trick of reading a sacred or official text from a roll or something without explaining the mechanism. Or maybe the trick of marking property with signs signifying the owner’s name. I’d think a shipwrecked sailor would have meant a thorough explanation of the alphabetic system as well.
why early Chinese omitted grammatical morphemes
Sumerian, for the matter, works the same way.
ə de vivre: In answer to your question (“Are there any examples of a culture being in contact with alphabetic writing and coming up with a logographic system for themselves?”), one example that comes to mind is the Yupik script: while the final product was a syllabary, it was originally a logographic script, whose creator (Uyaquq), tellingly, was never exposed to any writing system except the alphabet.
So in principle Rongorongo (whether it was logographic, syllabic or some mix of the two) could likewise be due to cultural diffusion from a European source, possibly (a) castaway(s), as I wrote above. Which, in turn, opens the door to an intriguing possibility: could the “Rongorongo” register of Rapanui contain loanwords or proper nouns drawn from the language of the castaway(s)?
Sequoyah himself, too, started out by devising parts of a logographic script, then quickly gave that up as too cumbersome and came up with an incomplete syllabary. All his prior exposure to writing was the Latin alphabet, and that’s what most of the glyph shapes are taken from.
More later.
There is no evidence in early Rapanui of any late loanwords. In contrast, work by Geraghty and Tent has uncovered quite a number of Dutch loanwords going back to the 17th century, which had spread throughout many parts of Polynesia in advance of actual European contacts.
I can’t argue with certainty that Rongorongo did not have any grammatical markers. I’m just saying that without them it becomes much harder to distinguish a decipherment from noise.
Y: I was referring to the “Rongorongo” register of Rapanui when I speculated that it might contain European loanwords, not to (ordinary spoken) Rapanui. And the reason I brought up the possibility was because (especially if grammatical markers were indeed not written) the presence of known vocabulary items might well ease the task of deciphering Rongorongo.
Etienne: What type of vocabulary items are the Dutch loanwords? If the purpose of the rongorongo writings was ceremonial or historical, their vocabulary is unlikely to include recent borrowings from a completely different culture.
Note the Rongorongo script behind the wahine in this painting by Gauguin: https://www.amazon.com/Epigraphic-Society-Occasional-Papers-0192-5148/dp/B0029U5LF8/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517690203&sr=1-10&refinements=p_27%3ABarry+Fell
m.-l., that was me who mentioned the Dutch loanwords… They are mostly trade items. See these three articles by Geraghty (an expert on Fijian and Polynesian) and Tent (an expert on early Dutch):
Early Dutch loanwords in Polynesia
More early Dutch loanwords in Polynesia
Exploding sky or exploded myth? The origin of Papālagi
This last one is actually a Malay word transported by the Dutch. It came up here at LH before. Astonishingly, Polynesian pāpalangi ‘White person’ has nothing to do with the Frank-derived words of Europe.
Marie-Lucie: it was Y who referred to the early Dutch loanwords in Polynesian, not I, and from what I know of them they refer mostly to introduced objects (boxes, needles…) in the context of immediate trade.
But any cultural diffusion leading to the birth of a writing system, by contrast, can be expected to be a little more intimate, and it would be unsurprising (although not inevitable, nota bene!) to find European loanwords in Rapanui (possibly in a specialized “Rongorongo” register) to refer to writing, writing instruments, letters and related topics. Indeed, as an example, consider Dutch itself: “schrijven”, its verb for “to write”, was borrowed from Latin “scribere”.
Etienne, it would be nice to have an identifiable word in Rongorongo. Even the final decipherment of Linear B depended, as I recall, on identifying one place name in the written material. However, the statistical study of RR is far behind where that of Linear B was, even in Kober’s time. In particular, there is no clear indication of word division anywhere.
The glyphs in Merahi metua no Tehamana are imaginary.
Y and Etienne, I apologize, both of you mentioned the Dutch words and I guess I went by the last mention.
My point was that the borrowings were likely to be for imported objects or acts and therefore unlikely to occur in texts that appeared to have been composed or at least used in some traditional cultural contexts. When a missionary tried to get people to translate some of the inscribed panels, two “readers” gave very different translations, probably because they (or at least one of them) did not now how to actually “read” the writing but (assuming they were not bluffing) could yet recite from memory what may have been actual traditional compositions.
If the Rapanui people did meet Dutch sailors, those sailors (or at least their officers) must have been the ones seen writing and reading what was written, even if they did not try to write the local language, let alone teach the people to do so. The rongorongo characters look superficially closer to handwriting than to print. It might be interesting to compare them with Dutch handwriting styles of the period of contact.
It was one reader, Metoro, who gave two different versions at dfferent times. Also, the Rapanui of his “reading” was full of recent Tahitian borrowings (that was after most of the Rapanui population had been living in Tahiti for a while). That is another reason to suspect that what he read had nothing to do with the text.
Once in Valparaíso I came across an item about Easter Island with an explanation in Spanish and English. The English was approximate at best and a place called “Shavesnui” had me stumped until I looked at the Spanish, The translator had obviously looked up “rapa” in a Spanish-English dictionary and found “shaves”.
Whenever Rongorongo is discussed, I wonder two things:
What is the stylistic relationship between the Rongorongo glyphs and other Rapanui carvings that are known to be representational? For example, there are stone carvings that are known to depict the annual Bird Man ceremony.
Is a short-lived form of writing like this really that unusual, especially among indigenous groups after their first limited contact with literate explorers? I am curious about this because Rapanui has received a grossly outsized amount of attention because of a feature of the island (the moai) that is utterly unrelated to the Rongorongo writing. Would comparable developments in writing have been found, say, on some other Polynesian islands, if they had been pored over by interested outsiders to the same extent?
There are very clear parallels between Rapanui rock art and Rongorongo iconography, though there are no rongorongo texts in the rock art at all.
Early European explorers were very keen on finding “lost civilizations” and early scripts. The decipherment of Egyptian writing and the discovery of cuneiform were very fresh in people’s minds. Missionaries, in particular, were quite aware of the power of writing. Early reports of rongorongo on Easter Island speak of a great deal of tablets in all the houses. No special attention was needed to notice them.
Marie-Lucie: In answer to your observation (“The rongorongo characters look superficially closer to handwriting than to print”), there existed a semi-alphabetical script used in indigenous North America in the nineteenth century, Great Lakes syllabic, which grew out of Roman script handwriting: perhaps at least some Rongorongo symbols grew out of some handwritten Roman letter or letter combination…
Which, indeed, come to think of it, needn’t even derive from Dutch, Spanish, English or any of the official languages of the European powers which were sending ships into the South Pacific. One thing which Geraghty and Tent’s work reminded me of was that Dutch ship crews at the time were quite multinational, with a large number of speakers of Dutch dialects, Frisian and Low German aboard: similar such linguistic diversity certainly existed aboard other (non-Dutch) European ships, and in some cases literate speakers of non-official languages were crew members: it is not widely known, for instance, that one of the earliest descriptions of the Beothuk in Newfoundland was written in…Breton (Really. And yes, I will give the reference should anyone request so downthread).
And in fact in some instances Frisian speakers aboard Dutch ships seem to have had some linguistic influence: see for example-
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271349519_Malamuk_-_A_West_Frisian_loanword_in_Greenlandic
-which seems to indicate that the linguistic composition of ships’ crews needs to be paid attention to, and indeed, in addition to the Dutch loanwords in Polynesia (linguistic globalization avant la lettre…), perhaps a Frisianism or two likewise made its way to the South Pacific.
In the context of the birth/creation of Rongorongo, however, here is a question: while there were many languages spoken by sailors in the South Pacific during the relevant historical period, which ones were substantial numbers of speakers (among sailors, nota bene!) literate in? I know that West Frisian was already marginalized if not extinct as a written language at the time, but among Low German speakers would literacy have been in Low or in High German? Or would the ones serving aboard Dutch ships have been literate in Dutch rather than in any non-Dutch West Germanic variety?
Some of the common rock glyphs show up as the “signatures” on the Spanish annexation document. I think that document gave people the idea that their glyphs could be used to represent more than individual objects or individual actions during a ceremony.
In the 17th century? Possibly Low, but most likely sailors would’ve been altogether illiterate.
Or would the ones serving aboard Dutch ships have been literate in Dutch rather than in any non-Dutch West Germanic variety?
Hard to say. In the 19th century schooling in the Lower German speaking areas was already in High German, although most people would probably still have spoken Plattdeutsch in daily life. In the 18th century some Dutch literacy existed in at least the Westernmost parts of Northern Germany; I’ve seen Dutch (not Plattdeutsch) inscriptions on 18th century buildings in Ostfriesland.
Etienne, I don’t need that reference, but I would like the reference you offered in 2014 to Old Gascon as a separate Romance language that was later occitanized.
John Cowan:
Chambon, Jean Pierre & Yan Greub. 2002. “Note sur l’âge du (proto)gascon”. REVUE DE LINGUISTIQUE ROMANE. 263-264, pages 473-495.
Hope you find it useful.
I would like the Breton Beothuk reference. Is it well-known? Is it in the HNAI?
If you google “Note sur l’âge du (proto)gascon” the first hit is a link to a pdf of the article.
Y: No, it isn’t in the HNAI, and I doubt it could be called well-known:
Bakker, Peter & Lynn Drapeau. 1995. “Adventures with the Beothuk in 1787: a testimony from Jean Conan’s autobiography”. In: Cowan, William (Ed.) PAPERS OF THE 25TH ALGONQUIAN CONFERENCE, pages 32-45. Ottawa, Carleton University.
Etienne, thanks! It’s even online.
It’s actually a fascinating read. It’s a diary in verse; unfortunately only the English translation is provided in this article. There’s quite a bit about Jean Conan working very hard at refusing a girl who takes a fancy to him.
Fascinating indeed! An English translation of a Breton text.
Thanks, Etienne, Hat. Not useful to me, but hopefully useful to my correspondent on Quora.
“Y” → at http://languagehat.com/rongorongo/ said:
<>
→ Most certainly, the RR evaluator code-named as “Y” is not cultivating false optimism when it comes to the decipherment of the classical script of Easter Island.
One has to indulge his/her sarcastic-like commentary… and be that as it may, I find it rather odd that “Y” does not offer his/her version of WHAT rongorongo eventually translates into. One wonders if the readers of this blog would be for the same “bad” shock (or a worse one) after evaluating “Y”’s forthcoming decipherments. Having read a good number of research articles lately, it may be said some people are working hard on rongorongo. Despite their “hit-and-misses”, their task was and is finding a plausible interpretation or understanding of the rongorongo script. If many rongorongo inscriptions – at least the authentic texts available to modern scholars – are composed “telegraphically”, which seems to be the consensus, nonetheless… then, one might expect the “grammatical voids” to be filled by recollecting the memory on this or that particular sequence. Regarding the general scarcity of wood on Easter Island, this is not an “excuse” – looking at it in the light of evidence, “wood” seems to have been wanting and in high demand on Easter Island, whether in pre-missionary or in early post-missionary times.
My theory is that even if the ancient scribes “wrote”, incised, or painted full sequences on other material supports (much more abundant than “wood”), given the operational mechanism/s of rongorongo, one would anticipate again the “telegraphic style” on them.
Despite the word jugglery of “Y”, “In the end you’ll get a chant, a prayer, or even a genealogy. It won’t make any sense, because the Polynesians were mysterious like that”, chants, prayers, genealogies, or formulaic statements in various rongorongo texts cannot be ruled out. The observation (or the ironic remark) that “Polynesians were mysterious” drags the conversation to useless gossipry. Pre-missionary Polynesians were as much human as Europeans, Africans, or Asians (etc.) in their good and bad moments – one has to attach importance to their early traditions and folklore by investigating them patiently until they become less and less “mysterious”.
Rongorongo seems to be a setting where one could lose him/herself in a maze of endless quibbles. Rather than commenting ironically one would do better engaging in some serious work and turn his/her findings over to a respectable publishing venue. In that case, the readership may see if “Y”’s master-findings are a bravura performance or another “bad” and biased translation along the way.
The journal Cryptologia published an analysis by Tomi S. Melka and Robert M. Schoch of an artefact related to the rongorongo tradition/script on Easter Island, which has thus far eluded a generally agreed upon decipherment. This old (circa 1860s?) engraved wooden tablet, known as the “San Diego Tablet” (SDT) after the San Diego (California) estate where it was once held, is in various respects – particularly carving style – comparable to the “London Tablet” (British Museum). The inscription on the SDT, evidently engraved by a scribe who possessed genuine training in or knowledge of rongorongo, even if rudimentary, is not identical or closely parallel to any inscription found in the standard corpus although it includes various previously known glyph configurations and combinations.
For starters, I have to say that I am an avid reader of the scientific literature concerning historical and pre-historical Rapa Nui, although perhaps not a researcher in the strict sense of the word. Objectivity is a feature that characterizes any assessment that prides itself as genuine science. The famous moai, the birdman cult, and the classical rongorongo script all merit my attention and I have been immersed lately in a great number of articles. I do not partake in favouring one author over another; I prefer rational and fact-based analyses.
The reason to offer some commentary here arises from the German-edition Wikipedia page on rongorongo as published on 27 September 2022.
Overall, the language used is ostensibly cautious and purports to offer professional comments. The authors of this Wiki-entry provide their evaluations of artefacts; they seem to perform selective custodial duties and update the interested German-speaking readers regarding the status of this area of studies.
Here I would like to offer my humble assessment of a passage on this Wikipedia page regarding the so-called “Rangitoki bark-cloth fragment,” a piece of mahute (bark-cloth) painted with ten rongorongo glyphs. The original articles that deal with this newly examined artefact are:
Robert M. Schoch and Tomi S. Melka. 2019. The Raŋitoki (Rangitoki) Bark-cloth Piece: A Newly Recognized rongorongo Fragment from Easter Island. Asian and African Studies, 28 (2): 113–148, and 413 –417.
Robert M. Schoch and Tomi S. Melka. 2020. The Raŋitoki (Rangitoki) Fragment: Further Analysis of a Short rongorongo Sequence on Bark-cloth from Easter Island. Asian and African Studies, 29 (1): 26–41, and 113 –118.
The specific passage from the German Wikipedia article reads (as translated into English): “The fact that the rongorongo script was also put on bark-cloth is unprecedented, but not wholly out of the question. The glyphs also occur on authentic rongorongo tablets or the ‘Santiago Staff.’ The ‘Rangitoki fragment’ is not a crude forgery, but rather an imitation of authentic rongorongo script, the authenticity of which must be questioned until the writing medium has been subjected to scientific examination and the age has not been determined by radiocarbon analysis.”
The initial task at this point is to compare this painted fragment with inscriptions in the generally accepted rongorongo corpus. Leaving aside the documented provenance for a moment (which dates back to March 1869 [not March 1899, as incorrectly stated in the German Wikipedia article], a couple of months prior to the documented collection by Europeans of any of the wooden tablets inscribed with rongorongo glyphs), the painted glyphs on the “Rangitoki bark-cloth fragment” appear (to my eye) more authentic than others that occur in parts of the extant corpus. One should consider the “London Tablet,” the “Chauvet fragment,” or the “Paris snuffbox”. As already known to scholars for over 60 years, these mentioned items are, for a lack of better words, “collectively” and “tacitly” admitted into the corpus of rongorongo. One has to mention also the medium of painting: bark-cloth when painted responds differently than wood when “inscribed”, especially when one considers the item employed during the process of painting on bark-cloth, most likely a fine brush or a stick of some kind. “Questioning” is good, I must agree, as it is a strong element of serious science. Yet, I feel obliged to also raise the question: Have the “London Tablet,” the “Chauvet fragment,” or the “Paris snuffbox” been submitted to a radio-carbon analysis? It just does not feel right that demands should be made for one item to be radio-carbon dated while other ones (which might not relate to the authentic script tradition as they appear to be late copies (“imitations”) with cruder or much cruder glyphs than those on the “Rangitoki fragment”) are accepted as more or less authentic without similar analyses. This sounds like discriminating bias, and I say this with no disrespect to the authors of the Wikipedia page in German.
What if the current owner of the “Chauvet fragment,” similar to the owner of the “Rangitoki fragment,” does not wish to carbon-date that fragment? Should we question by analogy its authenticity, by dismissing the “Chauvet fragment” as a forgery? A note here: one must concur that both privately owned artefacts are very vulnerable to rhetorical manipulation. “Disputes” or doubts should be resolved on an equal scientific basis, and not on personal preferences or agendas: “because I said so,” as a former boss of mine used to quip.
Radio-carbon dating is an inherently damaging process and is not warranted at this time in the opinion of the owner of the “Rangitoki fragment”. It should also be pointed that, as a physical scientist I have spoken to confirm, radio-carbon dating is not necessarily accurate enough to shed useful light on the age of an article that may date only to the middle or late nineteenth century. What would we learn from a radio-carbon date of, for instance, “1850 +/- 30 years” (that is, a probable date range of 1820 to 1880)? Such a radio-carbon range would be non-definitive in terms of placing the item temporally as either pre-missionary (pre-1864; according to the standard story rongorongo production effectively ceased after 1864) or post-missionary. It should be remembered that the “Rangitoki fragment” was collected in March of 1869. It seems by the standards of the “critics”, any wooden tablet inscribed with a rongorongo text and documented back to 1869 would immediately be acknowledged as an authentic piece (all the wooden tablets except for one were collected post-1869), yet these same critics question the authenticity of the “Rangitoki fragment”.
And last but not least, I wish the well-informed authors of the Wikipedia page in German success in locating a large fragment of mahute / bark-cloth (whether a full female “skirt” or an entire cloak) painted with classic rongorongo glyphs that dates back to pre-missionary times. I would then whole-heartedly commend them on their brilliant and dedicated efforts to shed additional light on the rongorongo script of Easter Island. At the same time, and I am sorry to say this, I shall leave it to other people to convey their assessments of the “Rangitoki fragment” in peer-reviewed academic articles.
If nothing else goes wrong, a few of us might hope to read some emotionally calm, unbiased, and well-researched articles in the future.
Cheers!
In any case, Rapanui grammar and phonology remained distinct from those of Tahitian.
Indeed. There is a near-universal merger from Proto-Polynesian /*r/ and /*l/ as one or the other (all but Tongan) and three near-universal changes, /*s/ > /h/ (all but Samoic), /ʔ/ > /Ø/ (all but Tongan and East Futunan, presumably a shared primitive character) and /*h/ > /Ø/ (all but Tongan and Nieuan). Rapanui added only a merger of /*f/ and /*w/ > /v/ (no /*v/ in Ppn). In Tahitian it’s another story: /*ŋ/ merged onto /k/ and then > /ʔ/ and /*w/ > /v/, leaving /*f/ unchanged.
Here’s a short monograph, “The History of Polynesian Phonology” (1971), that spells all this out.
@Y “There’s no decisive answer as to whether Rongorongo existed before European contact. There are reasonable but weak arguments both for and against. Only one tablet was carbon-dated, and it is of 19th century age.”
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“New research published on February 2nd [2024] in the journal Scientific Reports reveals an ancient wooden tablet found on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. This tablet contains mysterious writings known as the “rongorongo” script. What’s intriguing is that this tablet predates the arrival of Europeans on the island by more than two hundred years.
[….]
“Analysis shows that the wood dates back to between 1493 and 1509” (“Undeciphered Script Found on Easter Island Predates European Colonization” https://greekreporter.com/2024/02/10/script-easter-island-european-colonization/).
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I quote all of the above without taking a stand.
Sigh.
The last paragraph of the article linked to-
“However, Ferrara added that there’s a possibility the glyphs were carved on “old wood” from a tree cut down long before the rongorongo script was inscribed on it.”
-mentions what really ought to be the default assumption, since everything (else which is ) securely datable in Rongorongo was certainly written after European contact. The dissimilarity of Rongorongo script and European scripts is no argument against the theory explaining Rongorongo as a case of diffusion from Europeans to Polynesians either: after all, up here in my neck of the woods, the Cree syllabary in Canada certainly owes its existence to diffusion from Europeans to Indigenous North Americans, despite the Cree syllabary being quite unlike any script actively used by Europeans at the time.
More problematic is that, as they say, “Tablet D or Échancrée (P003), measures 23.9 × 12.3 × 2.4 cm. The wood is identified as Podocarpus latifolia, which is native to southeastern Africa and never grew on the island.” If the identification is correct, then the wood was certainly brought by Europeans, and since it’s a long-lived tree (hundreds of years), then it could be old heartwood. Other tablets were carved on this wood.
That said, the negative evidence for old rongorongo doesn’t carry all that much weight, because so far there are very few pre-European old-carbon-dated carved objects from the island at all, although wood-carving was brought in with the first Polynesian settlers.
Today I deal with a Book Review (2023) in the context of rongorongo. The book under consideration is a monograph published in 2021 by Paul Horley. In the end it will sound as I am being a reviewer of another reviewer who underwent the reviewing process by one or more individuals assigned by that journal.
For starters, and to be frank, I have not read so far the 2021 large book in its entirety… only several chapters which seemed highly relevant. The published review is,
Wieczorek, Rafal. 2023. Book review. Rongorongo: Inscribed objects from Rapa Nui, by Paul Horley. Journal of Polynesian Archaeology and Research 1: 87–89.
https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0069c37c-a50b-495e-9b76-f582909040d3/content
Given the number of published articles and reports in various academic venues, the cited reviewer appears to have some knowledge of the matter.
The Review published in the Journal of Polynesian Archaeology and Research is relatively compact, and brief in page numbers. After reading closely the Review, I may point out that the unsuspecting reader is left with the impression that the monograph is (nearly) the pinnacle of scholarship concerning the classical script of pre-missionary Easter Island.
Namely, Horley (2021) is praised for:
1. Unlike Barthel (1958) and Fischer (1997) in their respective monographs, “Horley (2021) does not make a claim of actually deciphering the script.”
2. “The new documentation method with computer-generated drawings overlaying high quality photographs” which deals with the tracings of the rongorongo symbols is superior to those of Barthel and Fischer. One should consider, in the words of the Reviewer, “[the] various mistakes discovered during studies of Barthel’s or Fischer’s tracings.” The Reviewer considers Horley (2021) has put a substantial amount of effort in this sense, and an explicit commendation follows, “The most important content is, however, the improved documentation of the badly damaged tablets M and O.” As any knowledgeable reader or student of the rongorongo script should know, the tablets “M” and “O” are Barthel’s (1958) alphabetic codes for the ‘Great Vienna tablet,’ and ‘Berlin tablet.’
3. The author of the monograph has discovered or rediscovered two “new” rongorongo-inscribed artefacts: the “St. Petersburg pa‘apa‘a” which bears one or two glyphs in an infixed shape, and the “Annapolis bird (birdman?)”, a wooden statuette, the black-and-white (low-resolution) photographs of which show more than two putative rongorongo or rongorongo-esque symbols— to wit, nine symbols.
.
4. The Reviewer mentions some “major findings of the author [2021]”, to be precise, that “shark teeth were probably not used for carving, nor banana leaves for any sketches that were to last longer than an hour.”
5. Horley (2021) claims the antiquity of the script tradition which harks back to ca. 500 years —considering the 1770 or 1864 timeframes— in contradistinction to Fischer’s hypothesis of the “stimulus diffusion,” result of the visit to Easter Island of the Spanish expedition in 1770.
6. The newly organized “sign catalog” that comprises 130 signs or glyphs in Horley (2021) is considered to be the “most important contribution.”
7. Inclusion of “all 12 appendices.” The listed appendices are: 7.1 the “parallel passages and delimiters”; 7.2 the “concordance of Grand Traditions text (tablets H, P, Q) … presented together with its fragmentary parallels from different tablets”; 7.3 “the same is done for texts Gr/K (Small Tradition)”, meaning, a concordance is established likewise for these two inscriptions; 7.4 “Appendix E gives us the dictionary of the Santiago staff (text I) stanzas.” I have to assume —or translate— “stanzas” of Wieczorek (2023) into particular chants or verses which loosely (or not) point to some ancient Rapanui “poetry”; 7.5 “Appendix F presents full concordances of those of the 154 parallel passages outlines in appendix A which have not been among those presented in appendices B–D”; 7.6 “Appendix G presents glossed translations of Rapanui language passages quoted in the main text”; 7.7 the “Rapanui words collected by the earliest European expeditions in the 18th century. The words are presented in their original form as well as in the probable reconstructions using modern orthography”; the “100-word Swadesh list for Rapanui, but only using the glosses collected during the 18th and 19th century western scientific expeditions”; 7.8 the “modern terms corresponding to the Leipzig-Jakarta list of 100 words particularly resistant to borrowing”; 7.9 the “character set for a rongorongo font designed by the author”; 7.10 “Appendix L, which is of principal importance as it presents the sign location table for all 130 principal rongorongo signs.”
Conclusions:
“The book is a major stepping stone in our quest for being able to read again the rongorongo documents” and “The work is recommended for anyone interested in learning the current state of rongorongo research as well as anyone who would want to gain general authoritative knowledge on the subject of this undeciphered script that is unique in Oceania.”
8. The only points of contention (i.e., disagreement or “polite objection”) presented by the Wieczorek (2023) are:
8.1 “… that text V and Y are late imitations or forgeries and as such should not be included in the corpus of rongorongo inscriptions.” Again, as any knowledgeable reader or student of the rongorongo script should know, the texts “V” and “Y” are Barthel’s (1958) alphabetic codes for the ‘Honolulu ua,’ and the ‘Paris snuffbox.’ Contrariwise, Horley (2021) decided to include them in the authentic rongorongo corpus. 8.2 “Unfortunately, Horley does not present a numerical transliteration of the rongorongo corpus using his sign catalog”, with the catalog displaying “130 signs.” 8.3 While “Appendix E [gave] us the dictionary of the Santiago staff (text I) stanzas. In this instance, one wonders why the same [or nearly the same] stanzas from the Honolulu tablet (text T) have not been also included.” Admittedly, the Honolulu tablet “T” probably shows a similar text type as the “Santiago staff.”
A Different Perspective says,
And what better way to reinforce the idea that Wieczorek (2023) has scrutinized the monograph (2021) and, similarly, finding a few weak and possibly peripheral spots that otherwise do not cast shadow over the worth and impact the book has or is going to have in the years to come.
Also it would be nice if we reviewed at some point another published Review of the said monograph. In comparative terms, it may cast a different outlook into the recent state of affairs of rongorongo research.
Cheers!
Horley thinks rongorongo is early, on circumstantial evidence. He argues that the encounter with the Europeans was too brief for the idea of writing to take hold, and that the time after European contact was too brief for the script to have become so regularized. You can counterargue both, but it’s all we have. At best you can shift the probabilities somewhat in one direction or another.
That’s the second time this week that Rongorongo shows up on my radar screen. It was also discussed on the Indo-Eurasian forum. There, Richard Sproat mentioned the possibility that it was a mnemonic system like Naxi. That could explain why the same reader gave two different readings at different times, if they were at least different versions of the same story or expositions on the same topic.