Rongorongo ( or ; Rapa Nui: ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that has the appearance of writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, but none have been successful. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of the glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing and to be an independent invention, it would be one of very few inventions of writing in human history.
Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a tangata manu statuette, and two reimiro ornaments. There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred.
Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as glyphs and have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing eyes.
Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The (somewhat variable) names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.
Etymology and variant names
Rongorongo is the modern name for the inscriptions. In the Rapa Nui language, or means "to recite, to declaim, to chant out".
The original name—or perhaps description—of the script is said to have been , "lines incised for chanting out", shortened to or "lines [for] chanting out". There are also said to have been more specific names for the texts based on their topic. For example, the ("lines of years") were annals, the ("lines of fishes") were lists of persons killed in war ( "fish" was homophonous with or used figuratively for "war casualty"), and the "lines of fugitives" were lists of war refugees. But Steven Roger Fischer writes that "the was originally a type of inscription. In the 1880s, a group of elders invented a derivative 'script' [also] called with which to decorate carvings in order to increase their trading value. It is a primitive imitation of ." An alleged third script, the or described in some mid-20th-century publications, was "an early twentieth-century geometric [decorative] invention".
Form and construction
thumb|right|The Small Santiago Tablet (tablet G) clearly shows the [[fluting (architecture)|fluting along which the glyphs were carved.]]
The forms of the glyphs are standardized contours of living organisms and geometric designs about one centimeter high. The wooden tablets are irregular in shape and, in many instances, fluted (tablets B, E, G, H, O, Q, and possibly T), with the glyphs carved in shallow channels running the length of the tablets, as can be seen in the image of tablet G at right. It is thought that irregular and often blemished pieces of wood were used in their entirety rather than squared off due to the scarcity of wood on the island.
Writing media
thumb|right|To maximize space, the text wraps around the edge of tablet K.
Except for a few possible glyphs cut in stone (see petroglyphs), and one possibility on barkcloth, all surviving secure texts are inscribed in wood. According to tradition, the tablets were made of toromiro wood. However, Catherine Orliac (2005b) examined seven objects (tablets B, C, G, H, K, Q, and L) with stereo optical and scanning electron microscopes and determined that all were instead made from Pacific rosewood (Thespesia populnea); the same identification had been made for tablet M in 1934. This tree, known as "Pacific rosewood" for its color and called in Rapanui, is used for sacred groves and carvings throughout eastern Polynesia and was evidently brought to Easter Island by the first settlers. However, not all the wood was native: Orliac (2007) established that tablets N, P, and S were made of South African yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius) and therefore that the wood had arrived with Western contact. Fischer describes P as "a damaged and reshapen European or American oar", as are A (which is European ash, Fraxinus excelsior) and V; notes that wood from the wreck of a Western boat was said to have been used for many tablets; and that both P and S had been recycled as planking for a Rapanui driftwood canoe, suggesting that by that time the tablets had little value to the islanders as texts. Several texts, including O, are carved on gnarled driftwood. The fact that the islanders were reduced to inscribing driftwood, and were regardless extremely economical in their use of wood, may have had consequences for the structure of the script, such as the abundance of ligatures and potentially a telegraphic style of writing that would complicate textual analysis.
thumb|left|Rongorongo tablets may have been influenced by writing on [[banana leaf|banana leaves like this one.]]
William J. Thomson reported a calabash, now lost, that had been found in a tomb and was "covered with hieroglyphics similar to those found on the incised tablets." The fraudulent Raŋitoki fragment was presented as a piece of bark cloth skirt decorated with rongorongo.
Oral tradition holds that, because of the great value of wood, only expert scribes used it, while pupils wrote on banana leaves. German ethnologist Thomas Barthel believed that carving on wood was a secondary development in the evolution of the script based on an earlier stage of incising banana leaves or the sheaths of the banana trunk with a bone stylus, and that the medium of leaves was retained not only for lessons but to plan and compose the texts of the wooden tablets. He found experimentally that the glyphs were quite visible on banana leaves due to the sap that emerged from the cuts and dried on the surface. However, when the leaves themselves dried, they became brittle and would not have survived for long.
Barthel speculated that the banana leaf might even have served as a prototype for the tablets, with the fluted surface of the tablets an emulation of the veined structure of a leaf:
Direction of writing
Rongorongo glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedon, left to right and bottom to top. That is, the reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line. When reading one line, the lines above and below it would appear upside down, as can be seen in the image .
However, the writing continues onto the second side of a tablet at the point where it finishes off the first, so if the first side has an odd number of lines, as is the case with tablets K, N, P, and Q, the second will start at the upper left-hand corner, and the direction of writing shifts to top to bottom.
Larger tablets and staves may have been read without turning, if the reader were able to read upside-down.
The direction of writing was determined by such clues as glyphs that twist as the line changes direction, glyphs that were squashed to fit in at the end of a text, and, when a particular tablet does not have such clues, parallel passages between tablets.
Writing instruments
thumb|right|Most of Gv4 was carved with a shark tooth. However, the two parts of the glyph second from right ( and [[Image:RR 062V.png|x20px|Bulb on line) are connected by a faint bent hair-line that may have been inscribed with obsidian. (The chevrons are also linked by such a line, too faint to be seen here, which connects them to the hand of the human figure.)]]
According to oral tradition, scribes used obsidian flakes or small shark teeth, presumably the hafted tools still used to carve wood in Polynesia, to flute and polish the tablets and then to incise the glyphs. The glyphs are most commonly composed of deep smooth cuts, though superficial hair-line cuts are also found. In the closeup image at right, a glyph is composed of two parts connected by a hair-line cut; this is a typical convention for this shape. Several researchers, including Barthel, believe that these superficial cuts were made by obsidian, and that the texts were carved in a two-stage process, first sketched with obsidian and then deepened and finished with a worn shark tooth. The remaining hair-line cuts were then either errors, design conventions (as at right), or decorative embellishments. Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hair-line cuts, as can be seen repeatedly in the closeup of one end of tablet B below. However, Barthel was told that the last literate Rapanui king, Ngaara, sketched out the glyphs in soot applied with a fish bone and then engraved them with a shark tooth.
Tablet N, on the other hand, shows no sign of shark teeth. Haberlandt noticed that the glyphs of this text appear to have been incised with a sharpened bone, as evidenced by the shallowness and width of the grooves. N also "displays secondary working with obsidian flakes to elaborate details within the finished contour lines. No other rongo-rongo inscription reveals such graphic extravagance".
Other tablets appear to have been cut with a steel blade, often rather crudely. Although steel knives were available after the arrival of the Spanish, this does cast suspicion on the authenticity of these tablets.
Glyphs
[[Image:Rongorongo B-v Aruku-Kurenga (end).jpg|thumb|right|A photographic negative of one end of tablet B. The numbers are line numbers; Fin de 13 means "end of [line] 13".]]
The glyphs are stylized human, animal, vegetable and geometric shapes, and often form compounds. Nearly all those with heads are oriented head up and are either seen face on or in profile to the right, in the direction of writing. It is not known what significance turning a glyph head-down or to the left may have had. Heads often have characteristic projections on the sides which may be eyes (as on the sea turtle glyph below, and more clearly on sea-turtle petroglyphs) but which often resemble ears (as on the anthropomorphic petroglyph in the next section). Birds are common; many resemble the frigatebird (see image directly below) which was associated with the supreme god Makemake. Other glyphs look like fish or arthropods. A few are similar to petroglyphs found throughout the island.
[[File:Rongorongo-sample-en.png|thumb|center|upright=2|Some of the more iconic rongorongo glyphs. The seated man [bottom left] is thought to be a compound. Readings from Barthel (1958). The captions in the right-most column are merely descriptive.]]
Origin
Oral tradition holds that either Hotu Matua or Tuu ko Iho, the legendary founder(s) of Rapa Nui, brought 67tablets from their homeland. The same founder is also credited with bringing indigenous plants such as the toromiro. But no homeland is likely to have had a tradition of writing in Polynesia or even in South America. Thus rongorongo appears to have been an internal development. Given that few if any of the Rapanui people remaining on the island in the 1870s could read the glyphs, it is likely that only a small minority were ever literate. Indeed, early visitors were told that literacy was a privilege of the ruling families and priests who were all kidnapped in the Peruvian slaving raids or died soon afterward in the resulting epidemics.
Dating the tablets
Little direct dating has been done. The start of forest-clearing for agriculture on Easter Island, and thus presumably the first settlements on the island, has been dated to circa 1200, implying a date for the invention of rongorongo no earlier than the 13th century. Tablet Q (Small Saint Petersburg) is the sole item that has been carbon dated, but the results only constrain the date to sometime after 1680.