Rongorongo Scripts Mystery

1448 Words6 Pages

The Rongorongo Scripts Mystery Rapa Nui, or as it known today, Easter Island is about 64 square miles. It is located in the South Pacific Ocean about 2,300 miles west of Chile and 2,500 miles east of Tahiti. Dutch explorers named it Easter Island in commemoration of the day of their arrival in 1722. After annexation from Chile in the 19th century, it maintains its economy based on tourism today with people coming from across the globe to see the almost 900 giant stone figures. These huge stone heads date back many centuries. Almost as mysterious as the statues found on the island are the tablets covered in Rongorongo script which were found on the island. The language has yet to be deciphered by professionals across the globe and can prove …show more content…

More recent archeological work has now challenged almost every concept of the previous ecocide idea. New studies have shown that the massive stone statues didn’t need logs to move around the island. Instead, researchers found that they could actually walk. Specially built roads were constructed for the statues and with a set of teams and ropes, the statues could be walked along the path the same way that a modern refrigerator can be walked across a kitchen. By shifting the weight of the structure back and forth along pivot points, the heavy stones could be walked to their destination. Log rails would not be necessary, and, therefore, the deforestation of the island could not be blamed on the statues. A better explanation for the deforestation can be found on many different islands throughout Polynesia. Rats, coming to the island aboard ships, ate the tree’s seeds and the trees were unable to reproduce (Lynas, …show more content…

Without other written texts describing the same events or details, it is impossible to decipher how the language fully works or what each glyph means. The limited number of tablets, lack of contexts to relate them to, and the loss of the ancient language have proven to make deciphering the tablets difficult. Some experts think that Rongorongo is a proto-writing, a set of symbols used to convey information without containing words in an effort to aid in memory and not as a recording device. There is one segment of one tablet which is thought to be a celestial calendar, but even this is not entirely understood (Ager, 2015). Wilhelm de Hevesy was the first academic in 1932 to consider that there is a link between Rongorongo and the Indus Valley script from India. He claimed that as many as forty different symbols could be correlated between the two different scripts. The idea seems plausible until radiocarbon dating found that the Indus Valley civilization took place between about 3,300 and 1,900 BC. This finding proved that the two civilizations were chronologically separated by more than 2,000 years (Ancient

Open Document