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The Other Mystery of Easter Island
Moai StatuesMoai Statues Easter Island is branded into popularconsciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moaistatues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacificisland holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknownpurpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island's lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written languageseems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within justtwo centuries it was exiled to obscurity.Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is awriting system comprised of pictographs. It has been foundcarved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts fromthe island's history. The art of writing was not known in anynearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient toconfound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so farhas been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writingthey observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island.However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist hasbeen able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhatisolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limitednatural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over thefollowing years the island's population of four thousand or so wasslowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slavetraders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitantsremained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strangelanguage was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, andforbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced theinhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.In 1864, Father Joseph Eyraud became the first non-islander torecord Rongorongo. Writing before the ultimate decline of theEastern Island society, he noted that "one finds in all the houseswooden tables or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphs."Despite his interest in the subject, he was not able to find anIslander willing to translate the texts. The islanders wereunderstandably reluctant to help, given that the Europeansforcefully suppressed the use of their native writing.
Rongorongo TabletsRongorongo TabletsSome time later, BishopFlorentin Jaussen of Tahiti attempted to translate the texts. Ayoung Easter Islander named Metero claimed to be able to readRongorongo, and for fifteen days the bishop kept a record whilethe boy dictated from the inscriptions. Bishop Jaussen gave upthe effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy hadassigned several meanings to the same symbol.In 1886 Paymaster William Thompson of the ship USS Mohicanbecame interested in the pictographic system during a journey tocollect artifacts for the National Museum in Washington. He hadobtained two rare tablets engraved with the script and wascurious about their meaning. He asked eighty-three-year-oldislander Ure Va’e Iko for assistance in translation because his agemade him more likely to have knowledge of the language. Theman reluctantly admitted to knowing what the tablets said, butdid 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'eIko might be more forthcoming under the influence of alcohol.After having a few drinks kindly provided by Thompson, theEaster Islander looked at the tablets once again. The old manburst into song, singing a fertility chant which described themating of gods and goddesses. William Thompson and hiscompanions quickly took down his words. This was potentially abig breakthrough, but Thomson struggled with assigning words tothe pictographs. Furthermore, he couldn't find another Islanderwho was willing to confirm the accuracy of this translation. While Thompson was ultimately unable to read Rongorongo, thetranslation that Iko provided has remained one of the mostvaluable clues on how to decipher the tablets.An Indus valley connection?An Indus valley connection?In thefollowing decades, many scholars have attempted to make senseof this mystery. In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy tried to linkRongorongo to the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization inIndia, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had acorrelating symbol in the script from India. Further examinationfound this link to be much more superficial than originallybelieved. In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel became one of the first
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