Easter Island is known to the world mainly for the moai, huge stone idols. Who raised them and why is unknown. But the island has another intriguing mystery - it is the ancient written language of Kohau Rongo-rongo. The signs engraved on the smooth surface of the tablets - winged people, strange two-legged creatures, boats, frogs, spirals and much more - amaze scientists.
Two tablets from the Kunstkamera
The text starts at the bottom-left corner of the tablet, and the characters flow in a continuous sequence from left to right. When he reached the end of the plank, the carver turned it upside down and continued to carve the marks - also from left to right. This recording system is called inverted boustrophedon.
Now in the museums of the world, 25 plaques, their fragments, as well as stone figurines, covered with the same mysterious signs, have been preserved.
The Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) contains two such tablets. The first HH Miklouho-Maclay received as a gift from Bishop Tepano Zhossan in July 1871, when the Russian ship "Vityaz" was off the coast of Tahiti.
Scientists to this day are debating the essence of this mysterious letter.
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Ancient unique language
On Easter Sunday in 1722, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeven landed on a small island. And then, for 48 years, this piece of land in the Pacific Ocean at a distance of 2,200 miles from the coast of South America has not been visited by a single European.
In 1770, two ships approached the coast of the island - "San Lorenzo" and "Site Rosalia" under the command of Felipe Gonzalez de Aedo. They decided to annex the abandoned piece of land to the possessions of the Spanish crown. When the act on the annexation of the island was drawn up (at first it was called San Carlsu, in honor of the king of Spain), the leaders of the local tribes put their signatures under the text signed by Captain Gonzalez. They carefully put some strange signs on the paper. As intricate as tattoos on their bodies or drawings on coastal rocks. So there was a written language on the island ?!
The Spaniards compiled a small dictionary of the local language. And when, years later, this dictionary fell into the hands of scholars, they, to their great surprise, discovered that many of the words recorded by the Spaniards were not in any of the Polynesian dialects. This means that there was some kind of special ancient language, which the inhabitants of the island spoke many centuries ago!
Unexplained disappearance
In 1864, the French missionary Eugene Eyraud reported in one of his letters to his homeland: “In all the houses of the island you can find wooden planks covered with various kinds of hieroglyphic signs, which the natives carve with sharp stones. These are, as a rule, images of animals unknown on the island … And here's a riddle: Eiro wrote that the plaques can be found in every home, and after a few years they almost completely disappeared, as if evaporated …
The bishop of the island of Tahiti, Tepano Jossan, ordered to find all the surviving tablets, because this was the sample of the first writing on the islands of Oceania. Whether the search was crowned with success is unknown.
The missionaries who followed Eugene Ayrault to Easter Island found only five tablets. But the natives, even the oldest, could no longer explain the meaning of even one sign, let alone read the entire text. Nowadays, the efforts of search expeditions from time to time are crowned with success, and scientists become the happy owners of unique tablets. Ships, according to the state of the tree on which the signs were carved, the writing period on the island was long. Some planks are so old that they can crumble when touched, others look quite new, and some are clearly made from the wreckage of a European boat's oar.
But maybe, in times close to us, the islanders simply copied ancient writings, not understanding their meaning?
Sudden death interrupted work
In 1870, an aborigine named Metoro Tau a Ure tried to read several texts for Bishop Jossan, naming objects depicted by signs, but the general meaning of what was written was never revealed.
But what if the Easter eggs kept the sacred knowledge in absolute secret?
From March 1914 to August 1915, an English expedition led by Mrs. Catherine Scorsby Routledge worked on the island. Someone told her that an old man named Tomenika lives in the village, who reads texts on tablets and even knows how to write them himself! Catherine immediately went to the village. As a sign of respect for the guest, Tomenika wrote several signs, but did not want to initiate the foreigner into the secret of rongo-rongo. He only said that the ancestors will punish anyone who reveals the secret of the letter to the pale-faced.
Strangely, Catherine Routledge had barely published her diary when sudden death interrupted this young woman's work. The materials of the expedition were lost …
Forty years after the death of old Tomenica, the Chilean scholar Jorge Silva Olivares met his grandson, Pedro Pate, who, imbued with Jorge's confidence, gave him the rongo rongo dictionary. Pedro inherited the dictionary from his grandfather, who compiled it about 65 years ago, with the desire to teach the ancient language to the younger generation of islanders.
Olivares managed to photograph a notebook with the words of the ancient language, but, as he himself writes, “the reel with the film turned out to be either lost or stolen. The notebook itself also disappeared."
Mysterious notebook
In 1956, Thor Heyerdahl visited a hut on Easter Island. The owner of the hut, Esteban Atana, told the traveler that he had a notebook covered by his grandfather, who knew the secret of kohau rongo rongo. In this notebook, the grandfather depicted all the signs of the ancient writing of Easter Island and wrote down their meaning in Latin letters next to them. But when the researcher tried to examine the notebook, Esteban immediately hid it.
Shortly after this meeting, Esteban Atan sailed in a small homemade boat to the island of Tahiti. Eyewitnesses said that the man took the notebook with him. Nobody else heard of him. The fate of the notebook remained unknown.
Striking similarities
Scientists have repeatedly analyzed the writing of Easter Island, trying to decipher the mysterious signs.
At one time, missionaries drew attention to the similarity of the writing of Easter Island with the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt. Moreover, it turns out 175 kohau rongo-rongo icons completely coincide in writing with the hieroglyphs of Hindustan. And in 1951, the Austrian archaeologist Robert Heine-Geldern established the similarity of the kohau rongo-rongo with the ancient Chinese pictorial writing.
American and German scientists believe that writing once existed in Polynesia, but it was lost and only miraculously survived on Easter Island.
Talking boards
Over the years, scientists have tried to decipher the mysterious signs. But it was not possible to finally understand their meaning.
In 1994 I. K. Fedorova (leading researcher at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences) has found the key to the code! The fact is that most of the rongo-rongo signs are conveyed by a completely different object that is depicted in the drawing. For example, the sign depicts a fish (in the language of the inhabitants of the island fish - ika), but in fact it is not a fish, but a plant, which is also called ika. The main difficulty was to correctly identify the object conveyed by the signs, determine its name and understand what else the given word could mean. Irina Konstantinovna presented her results in the monograph "Talking Plates" of Easter Island ".
Magical ritual of the tillers
So what did the tablets of Easter Island or Rapanui tell about (this is how the name of this island sounds in the language of the Polynesians).
When the island's forests were destroyed, the only source of food was not the fisherman's catch, but a good harvest. Before starting to plow the land and plant root crops in it, people performed special magical rituals with obligatory chants addressed to the spirits of their ancestors. Thus, in their opinion, they appeased the spirits, who were supposed to take care of favorable weather for the cultivators and a rich harvest. Magical agricultural chants were recorded on tablets for future generations.
That is why the plaques covered with signs were carefully kept in the homes of the islanders, as well as in the caves, on the walls of which spirits were depicted. The secret of the mysterious signs was known only to the locals.
At present, research into the writing of Easter Island continues. Perhaps scientists will still be able to unravel the mysteries of this mysterious island, lost in the Pacific Ocean, the island that locals call the center of the world.
O. Arsentieva. “Interesting newspaper. Incredible No. 23 2010