Rongorongo
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Rongo-rongo_script.gif
Rongo rongo, one of three scripts of Easter Island, has remained a mystery since its discovery. It has not been deciphered despite attempts by many linguists, and claims of success by some of them that invariably resulted in ridicule by peer scientists. Just 21 wooden tablets remain bearing the script.
A Hungarian scholar and author of several books, Wilhelm or Guillaume de Hevesy, in 1932 called attention to the apparent similarities between some of the rongo-rongo characters of Easter Island and those of the prehistoric script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, correlating dozens (at least 40) of the former with corresponding signs on seals from Mohenjo-daro. This correlation was republished in later books, for example by Z.A. Simon (1984: 95). Rongo-rongo may mean peace-peace, and the texts may record peace treaties, possibly between the long ears and the conquering short ears.
Alternatively, Steven Fischer interprets the rongo-rongo texts as litanies (so to speak) of mystical couplings between forces of nature. He suggests that the islanders developed the script after encountering writing when a Spanish ship called at Easter Island in 1770.
Martha Macri of the University of California at Davis, who has also worked on the Mayan script, suggests that the majority of the hundreds of glyphic units are in fact compounds of a much more limited set of basic elements. The number of these elements, at less than 70, suggests that Rongorongo may be a syllabary augmented by perhaps a dozen logograms, as 55 glyphs would be required for a pure syllabary of ten consonants and five vowels (10x5 consonant-vowel syllables plus 5 vowel-only syllables). The suspected logograms, such as the lunar crescent and the lizard, don't form compounds. Many of the glyphic elements appear to be cognate with petroglyphs found around the island. The number of elements per compound unit (1 to 4 or 5, averaging about 2) suggests that each unit might represent a word, rather like European cursive scripts. Indeed, this "is consistent with the assertion of islanders that each graphic unit represents a single word". If the script is indeed a syllabary, and especially if it's divided into words in the European fashion, this would suggest that the idea for writing came from European explorers through contact diffusion, as Fischer suggested. [When people are exposed to the idea of phonetic writing, without actually understanding the alphabetic system, and then set out to create scripts of their own, they usually create syllabaries. E.g., Cherokee of the US, Vai of Liberia, Afaka of Suriname. However, the few cases we have of scripts created ex nihilo in ancient times (Sumerian/Egyptian/Elamite [whichever came first], Chinese, Olmec/Mayan) are all logographic systems.]
It has also been suggested that rongo-rongo is not a writing system proper but is a genealogical record, a calendar, a mnemonic system or a choreography.
External links
- DMoz category (http://dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Archaeology/Topics/Epigraphy/Rongorongo/)
- Steven Roger Fischer, "Easter Island's Rongorongo Script" (http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/fischer.html)
- www.rongorongo.org has the entire known corpus of rongorongo texts and information on current advances in decipherment (http://www.rongorongo.org/)de:Rongorongo