EASTER Island in the southeastern Pacific is one of the remotest spots
inhabited by humans. From evidence pieced together by archaeologists and
linguists, we now know that this volcanic speck more than 3000 kilometres from
the coast of Chile was probably first colonised by people from eastern Polynesia
in the early centuries AD. But much about the island remains enigmatic,
including its best-known feature, the colossal stone carvings, or moai,
many of which stared inland from the coast. Equally mysterious until now was the
Easter Island script known as rongorongo.
The script takes the form of lines of hieroglyphs, in which every second line
is inscribed upside down. Before missionaries brought Christianity to the
island, Easter Islanders believed that wooden tablets incised with these glyphs
were filled with mana, or spiritual power. The name rongorongo means
鈥渃hants鈥� or 鈥渞ecitation鈥�, and the key to understanding it lay with the island鈥檚
royals, chiefs, priests and teachers, who carved the tablets and would recite
their chants at important gatherings. But by the time rongorongo came to the
attention of academic linguists in the late 19th century, none of these experts
remained. The script鈥檚 meaning had been lost.
In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel, an ethnologist from the University of
T眉bingen in Germany, identified 120 basic elements of
rongorongo鈥攎ostly stylised objects or creatures鈥攚hich combine to
give between 1500 and 2000 glyphs. Since then, however, all efforts to decipher
it have failed, and more recently it became a happy hunting ground for various
enthusiasts who sought its origins in Semitic tribes, pre-Inca Peru, Indus
Valley civilisation, the lost continent of Mu and even extraterrestrials. Now,
however, Steven Fischer, a linguist born in the US and working as an independent
researcher in New Zealand, has made a major breakthrough.
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The first European known to have visited Easter Island was the Dutch
commander Jacob Roggeveen, who found it on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722. Some of
the Europeans who followed spent days exploring ashore, and visited the houses
there, but for well over a century none of them mentioned the script. Rongorongo
was first documented in 1864 by Eug猫ne Eyraud, a French missionary who
reported finding wooden tablets incised with hieroglyphs in every house on the
island.
Strictly taboo
Perhaps the long gap is not surprising, because according to local people
these tablets had previously been kept apart in special houses and were strictly
taboo. In pre-missionary times the tablets were the preserve of an elevated
class of islanders. At formal gatherings, the tablets were flourished, and the
inscriptions were ritually sung to activate their spiritual power. Depending on
their content, inscriptions could elicit supernatural powers to kill a murderer,
enhance female fertility, invoke rain, or increase crop productivity or the size
of a catch.
By Eyraud鈥檚 time massive depopulation meant that the taboo had been lifted
following the collapse of the island鈥檚 society. About one third of its three
thousand inhabitants were taken to Peru by slave traders in 1862 and 1863. And
although the rongorongo experts escaped this fate, they and many remaining
islanders died in a subsequent smallpox epidemic. From then on, no more tablets
were produced and today only 25 remain.
As far as we know, Rongorongo is the only indigenous script to have been used
anywhere in Oceania before the 20th century. So how did it originate? It seems
most likely that the script was a very late phenomenon, directly inspired by a
visit from the Spanish in 1770. Their leader, Felipe Gonzalez y Haedo, offered
the island鈥檚 chiefs and priests a written proclamation of annexation, to be
鈥渟igned in their native characters鈥�. This was probably their first experience of
speech embodied in parallel lines, and they seem to have adopted this form of
writing using characters derived from motifs already present in the island鈥檚
rich rock art.
Recent attempts to reproduce the carvings suggest that the glyphs were first
lightly etched on wood with sharp flakes of obsidian (a volcanic glass) and then
deeply incised with a blunt shark鈥檚 tooth. Islanders say that in pre-missionary
days many tablets were destroyed in wars or deliberately burnt to remove the
spiritual power of rival clans. Other tablets were buried with the honoured
dead. And it is possible that following the introduction of Christianity many
inscriptions were hidden in sacred caves by clandestine adherents to the old
religion.
All the known specimens are now housed in museums around the world. They
contain a total of over 14 000 glyphs, and range from a tablet with only two
glyphs incised on it to one with 2300. Most of their inscriptions were published
for the first time in the 1950s by Barthel. In his pioneering study, he
concluded that rongorongo was a rudimentary writing system鈥攖he individual
glyphs did not represent an alphabet, instead each was a kind of cue for a whole
word representing an object or idea. Despite efforts from several academic
linguists, particularly in Russia, it has taken forty years for another
breakthrough.
Fischer turned his attention to rongorongo in January 1989, while living in
Germany. 鈥淢y interest in Pacific languages began in the mid-1960s when I learnt
Hawaiian and Samoan, followed by Maori in 1975,鈥� he says. His goal was to
produce a complete documentation of rongorongo鈥檚 history, traditions and texts.
For the next six years he worked full-time on this project, travelling the world
to discuss the script with almost every active researcher in the field and to
study at first hand all the surviving tablets. Despite his efforts, however,
Fischer could not complete the task鈥攈e was denied access to two wooden
tablets held by Washington鈥檚 Smithsonian Institution. His definitive book on the
subject, Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script, will be published next
year.
This is the first time that a researcher who set out merely to document an
unknown historical script has ended up also deciphering it. The key to Fischer鈥檚
success鈥攈is 鈥淩osetta Stone鈥濃�攚as the Santiago Staff, a wooden sceptre
126 centimetres long and 6.5 centimetres wide, carrying 2300 glyphs鈥攖he
longest inscription in existence. The staff, which once belonged to an Easter
Island ariki or leader, was acquired by the Chilean Navy in 1870 and is
now in Santiago鈥檚 Museum of Natural History. Fischer recalls vividly the moment
he began to crack the code. 鈥淥ne has a peak experience, a sudden insight that
one is seeing a structure for the first time,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou suddenly know
you鈥檙e reading the script. It鈥檚 a marvellous moment intellectually and
别尘辞迟颈辞苍补濒濒测.鈥�
This revelation came to him in February 1993, just a week after returning to
Germany from a trip to Easter Island and Santiago. While scrutinising
photographs and his detailed notes, he noticed that vertical lines appear at
irregular intervals in the text on the Santiago Staff, dividing it into almost a
hundred sections. He then spotted phallus-like motifs on the glyphs immediately
to the right of each vertical line. That the text reads from left to right had
already been confirmed by Fischer鈥檚 discovery of a particular series of glyphs
that appears on a single line on one tablet but is inscribed over two lines on
another, 鈥渂reaking鈥� over the right end. So the glyph to the right of a dividing
line is the one that begins the next division.
Fischer then noticed that within each division, approximately every third
glyph (the 4th, 7th, 10th, 13th, and so on) also has this phallic suffix. None
of the divisions has the suffix on its last or its penultimate glyph; none of
the divisions contains fewer than three glyphs; most divisions contain multiples
of three, and the first in each trio sports a phallus in almost every case. In
other words, the Santiago Staff has a basic triad structure.
Having made this breakthrough, Fischer discovered the same
structure鈥攚ithout the helpful vertical lines鈥攐n two other rongorongo
tablets, the Small Santiago Tablet and the Honolulu Tablet I. Both had triads,
though less routinely than on the Staff, and the same placing of phallic
suffixes. This led him to characterise the structure by the formula X1YZ
n, where X1 designates the glyph with a phallus suffix, Y and Z are the
glyphs that follow X, and n denotes the number of repetitions of the
triad structure.
So what does it mean? Easter Islanders, like all ancient Polynesians,
explained creation in terms of primordial copulations: male copulates with
female and produces offspring. This is reflected in the triad structure, which
is common in their procreation chants and orally transmitted genealogies.
American naval officers who visited the island in 1886 described a procreation
chant called Atua Mata Riri, sung by Ure Va鈥檈 Iko, a 鈥減atriarch of the
island鈥�. It lists 41 fanciful copulations and their issue: for example, 鈥淕od
Mata Riri copulated with Sweet Lime; there issued forth the poporo plant鈥�.
Although linguistically contaminated, this chant was probably pre-missionary in
origin and was almost certainly based on an original rongorongo composition.
Fischer concluded that the three rongorongo inscriptions on which he detected
the triad structure are 鈥渃osmogonies鈥� or creation chants. In genealogies, by
contrast, the issue would have to be the subject of each subsequent triad, a
pattern that occurs only three times on the Santiago Staff, and not at all on
the others. In his notation, the copulator is X, the copulatee is Y, and Z is
the issue. The 1 represents 鈥渃opulated with鈥�, and the phrase 鈥渢here issued
forth鈥� is implicit in the triad structure.
If Fischer鈥檚 analysis is correct then rongorongo is a mixed writing system:
part logographic, meaning that the glyphs can represent words for things; and
part semasiographic, meaning it can also depict an act without recourse to
language. Fischer has provisionally deciphered one triad from the Santiago
Staff: a bird with a phallus, followed by a fish and a sun translates as 鈥淎ll
the birds copulated with fish, and there issued forth the sun,鈥� he believes.
Not every specialist is fully convinced by these claims, but Barthel, the
doyen of rongorongo studies, has given Fischer鈥檚 discovery of the triads on
these three tablets his unlimited endorsement. At a recent conference at Leiden
in the Netherlands, Fischer鈥檚 decipherment of the texts was given unanimous and
enthusiastic approval by experts on Austronesian linguistics鈥攖he largest
of the world鈥檚 language families, stretching from Madagascar in the west to
Easter Island in the east.
Now, in a second breakthrough, Fischer has found that as many as 12 of the
remaining 22 tablets also consist wholly or in part of procreation triads. He
first noticed that the simple triad he has translated from the Santiago Staff is
repeated on a different tablet, known as Echancr茅e, but without the
phallic suffix on the first glyph. He explains this as a graphic elision,
signifying an evolution or variation during the script鈥檚 short history. If he is
right, then this tablet also represents a sequence of procreations. Following
this, Fischer found similar cosmogonies on 11 more tablets, all of them lacking
the phallic suffix on the X glyph.
Degenerated form
鈥淚t鈥檚 a logical inference鈥�, says Fischer, 鈥渢hat the inscriptions that show
the phallus would be earlier than the ones choosing to delete it.鈥� He suspects
that the Santiago Staff is one of the oldest because of the skill with which it
was carved, and because oral traditions indicate that staffs were the original
medium of the inscriptions. 鈥淭he texts without the phallus are a later creation,
being on pieces of driftwood and showing a degenerated form of carving.鈥�
The 15 tablets inscribed with cosmogonies contain 85 per cent of the total
known rongorongo text. As their survival was a matter of pure chance, it is
likely that most of the destroyed or lost tablets also carried procreation
chants. 鈥淎mong the other inscriptions, one appears to be a calendar text, as
Barthel discovered in the 1950s, and then there are anomalous sign groupings
that still have to be identified as to genre,鈥� says Fischer. Much therefore
remains to be done before the inscriptions can be read in their entirety, if
such a feat ever proves possible.
But Fischer seems to have found the key to reading rongorongo inscriptions,
and that in itself constitutes a successful decipherment. It also makes Fischer
unique among linguists. Shortly before he set to work on rongorongo he revealed
the secrets of Europe鈥檚 鈥渙ldest literature鈥� when he cracked the code of the
3600-year-old Phaistos Disc from ancient Crete. Fischer鈥檚 latest success has
made him the only person ever to have deciphered two completely different
scripts.