There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. oral accounts suggest that only a small elite were ever literate, and that the tablets were considered sacred.
About Decipherment of rongorongo in brief
There have been numerous attempts to decipher the rongorongo script of Easter Island since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. Apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to deal with a lunar calendar, none of the texts are understood, and even the calendar cannot actually be read. oral accounts report that experts in one category of tablet were unable to read other tablets, suggesting either that rongsorongo is not a unified system, or that it is proto-writing that requires the reader to already know the text. It is not known if rongOrongo directly represents the Rapa Nui language – that is, if it is a true writing system – and oral accounts suggest that only a small elite were ever literate, and that the tablets were considered sacred. In the late 19th century, within a few years to decades of the destruction of Easter island society by slave raiding and introduced epidemics, two amateur investigators recorded readings and recitations of rong orongo tablets by Easter Islanders. In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne Jaussen, received a gift from recent converts on Easter Island: a long cord of human hair wound around a discarded rongerongo tablet. He immediately recognized the importance of the tablet, and asked Father Hippolyte Roussel to collect more tablets and to find islanders capable of reading them.
The next year in Tahiti Jaussen found a laborer from Easter Island, Metoro Tauꞌa Ure, who was said to know the inscriptions “by heart’”. Sometime between 1869 and 1874, Jaussen worked with Metoro to decipher four of the tablets in his possession: A Tahua, B Aruku kurenga, C Mamari, and E Keiti. A list of the glyphs they identified was published posthumously, along with a complete account of the chants for A and B. Though at first taken for a Rosetta Stone, it has not led to an understanding of the script. It has been criticized for glossing five glyphs as porcelaine, among other inadequacies, but this is a mistlation. Almost a century later, Thomas Barthel published some of Jaussen’s notes on some of Metoro’s chants in a book called Rapanui, which means “cowrie’s” in English. Barthel compared Metoro’’s notes with parallel texts in the Chinese, and found that the parallel texts could be read in reverse, backwards, and in reverse. He also found that Metoro had also read the lunar calendar in the reverse but backwards on the obverse, and failed to recognize the lines on the reverse. However, Barthel has not found a material ranslation of the five Glyphs as ‘porcelaine’ and the French glossed them as ‘cowrie-like’.
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This page is based on the article Decipherment of rongorongo published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
