Almost everyone on our planet knows about the giant statues of Easter Island. But few people know about the tablets with the ancient Rongorongo script found on the island….
He discovered wooden tablets with ancient writing in 1864. missionary Eugene Eyraud. In Soviet times, Eugene Eyraud was groundlessly accused of having burned most of the plaques found. It is no longer possible to establish who was the first to launch this duck, he did not burn anything as a missionary. When Eugene got to the island, there was an internecine war on it. Most of the precious tablets with inscriptions simply burned up in the fires.
The missionaries who came after Eugène Eyraud were able to find only five tablets. And even the oldest inhabitants of the island could not explain to them the meaning of at least one sign.
In 1915. Someone told the members of the English expedition who were on the island that an old man who speaks the Rongorongo script lives in one of the villages. Katherine Scorsby, Routledge, who was in charge of the expedition, immediately went to the old man. Only out of respect for the guest, the old man wrote a few signs, but Rongorongo flatly refused to devote the stranger to the secret of writing, arguing that the ancestors could punish anyone who reveals the secret of writing with the pale-faced.
Two weeks after visiting Catherine Routledge, the old man died. None of the local population doubted that his death was the revenge of the dead Maori ….
Currently, in various museums around the world, only 25 plaques and several stone figurines have been preserved, dotted with the same mysterious signs. Tablet text starts at the bottom left corner and continues from left to right. When the board ended, the carver turned it upside down and continued on, drawing winged people, strange two-legged creatures, weaving boats, frogs, lizards, turtles, stars and intricate spirals.
The plaques stored in museums show a total of 14,000 hieroglyphs. About forty years ago they were published by the German ethnographer Thomas Barthel.
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In an attempt to study the Kohau Rongorongo writing, the American scientist Stephen Fisher mastered the Hawaiian, Samoan and Majori languages, collected all the documentation that related to Rongorongo, descriptions of traditions, rituals and beliefs of the inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). For six years, he met with all the experts in the field of rongorongo and got acquainted with the originals of the tablets. Strange, but two, stored in the Washington Smithsonian Institution, he was not shown ….
Fischer's painstaking, many years of work resulted in the most comprehensive monograph on kohau rongorongo, published in 1997.
The Santiago rod became the basis for the work. It is a kind of wooden scepter 126 cm long and 6.5 cm thick. The wand has 2,300 hieroglyphs carved on it. At one time, it was in 1870. bought by officers of the Chilean Navy. Previously, the wand belonged to one of the leaders of the island. And now the scepter is in the Natural History Museum of the city of Santiago.
Fischer went on to analyze other rongorongo texts. And he came to the conclusion that the texts he analyzed are the recorded "cosmogony" of the Paschal people. They started with the Book.
In Russia, Irina Konstantinovna Fedorova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Leading Researcher of the Department of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia of the MAE RAS, was engaged in deciphering the writing of Rongorongo. She defended her doctoral dissertation on the topic “Easter Island. Essays on the culture of the XIX-XX centuries.
In 2001. her book "Talking Plates" from Easter Island was published, which contains deciphering, reading and translation of all the texts from Easter Island that have survived in the world. Including a catalog of signs and translation of these signs. Fedorova also found out that this is not the language of the Paschal people, but another, more ancient one. And Paschal people simply cannot understand him….