Life is full of surprises and mysteries. About 150 years ago, in the already well-developed Sicily and Malta, the ancient remains of dwarf elephants were discovered, and more recently, the same elephants, but alive, were found in Borneo. What can we say then about the islands of Oceania, many of which have been discovered relatively recently. Every land is a mystery …
Among the 30 thousand islands of Oceania, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, as Europeans call it) is the most mysterious. The first thing that catches the eye of everyone arriving here is the huge stone moai idols along the coast. They struck Dutch sailors Jacob Roggeven - the first Europeans
Since 1888, the island belongs to Chile, whose capital is more than 3,500 km away from it. At that time, only a hundred natives lived on the island. The island is bare, blown by all the winds, the soil is infertile, there is little water. The eye has nothing to catch on - not a single tree, only stone idols stick out everywhere.
Where did they come from, who sculpted them and put them at full length along the banks - this is the first of the mysteries of Rapa Nui. But today it can be considered solved: quarries were found where giant idols were cut down, and Thor Heyerdahl was able to figure out how they were delivered from there to the installation site and placed vertically.
But there was still one more mystery - mysterious letters covering wooden planks found in the caves of the island, and later found in many of the houses of its inhabitants.
KOHAU RONGO-RONGO
Promotional video:
For the first time, scientists became aware of them in the middle of the 19th century, when the first tablet, made, like everyone else, from toromiro wood, was presented to the Tahitian bishop Tepano Jossen. With the help of the missionary Hippolytus Roussel, the bishop managed to collect a whole collection of kohau ("talking tablets"). He himself believes that this is only a small part of the ritual treasures of the leaders of Rapa Nui.
In addition, Jossen met Metoro Tau a Ure, who had moved to Tahiti from Easter Island, who claimed that in his youth he studied at the rongo-rongo school and can read tablets. Modern scholars are extremely skeptical about Metoro's "readings", calling them the fruit of his fantasy. In addition, he did not read the texts, but rather sang, he could not literally translate them, since he did not understand the meaning of many signs.
The inherited tablets were lost over time: many of their owners were taken from the island by slave traders, others died. About 10-15 rarities have survived to this day, of which three are kept in the National Museum of Chile, one in Tahiti and two in St. Petersburg (the exact number is unknown, since some cohau were in private collections).
In museums in Europe and the United States, there are photographs of about 30 cohau texts. The language in which they are written is called rongo-rongo by the locals. Bishop Jossen, being a scientist, became interested in "talking tablets" and tried to decipher their content. The article, written by the bishop and published 15 years after the first find, fell into the hands of the English ethnographer Routledge.
She managed to find a Rapunian named Tomeniko, who supposedly knew Rongo-rongo. But this happened when he, seriously ill, was in a leper colony. Tomeniko said that scribes shortened the texts and that in addition to rongo-rongo, which was considered a sacred letter, there was also a simplified language intended for everyday use. The latter made deciphering even more difficult. 2 weeks after meeting with Routledge, Tomenico was gone. He was the last resident of the island who knew at least something about rongo-rongo, now the secret of the language has gone with him.
ONLY IN THE WORLD
More than a dozen scientists tried to decipher the outlandish letters, among them the Hungarian Hevesi, the American Fischer, the German Bartel, the Frenchman Metro, the Russians Butinov, Knorozov, the father and son Pozdnyakovs, Fedorova and others. They were looking for the similarity of Rongo-Rongo with the already unraveled languages of the Sumerians, Egyptians, ancient Chinese, the writing of the Indus Valley, and even with the Semitic languages - the solution did not come.
The question also haunted: if rongo-rongo comes from these languages, then how did it get to this remote and isolated island? Oddly enough, back in the 30s of the last century, a Leningrad high school student Boris Kudryavtsev, a member of the circle of ethnographers at the Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, approached the solution to rongo-rongo. He and two of his comrades, who called themselves "Maclay's descendants" (meaning the famous Russian traveler N. Miklouho-Maclay, who, by the way, donated 2 kokhau tablets to the museum) for two years stubbornly tried to decipher the unknown language.
They carefully compared the Leningrad tablets with photographs of others received from Madrid and Brussels, and established their similarities in many respects.
The curious young men could not fully decipher the texts of the tables on the tablets; they could only establish their completely original character and note some patterns of writing. The outbreak of war interrupted the research of amateur ethnographers, they died on its fronts. But Kudryavtsev left notes, which after the war were published by Professor D. A. Olderogge and highly appreciated by linguists.
Of the researchers of the last period, Stephen Roger Fisher, Thomas Bartel and Irina Fedorova advanced the farthest in solving rongo-rongo. However, each of them adheres to its own version of deciphering the mysterious letters, and there is no single point of view in the scientific world. That is, in fact, rongo-rongo still remains a language that is not fully understood.
Drawings similar to rongo-rongo icons can be found on stones too
But over the past century, scientists have managed to penetrate the secrets of cuneiform, read the letters of the Mayan people and even texts written in a hitherto unknown Carian language. The only thing that all linguists agree on is that Rongo-Rongo is a completely independent language, it is not found anywhere except on Easter Island.
At the same time, not only the content of the texts printed on the tablets remains unclear, but also the origin of the people who created them. How and when did people get to this piece of land lost in the ocean?
THE ADMIRAL'S GUESS
Something becomes understandable if we recall the version of Admiral Dumont-D'Urville, a famous navigator and explorer. Unfortunately, his works remained unfinished, but he was the first to hypothesize that many thousands of years ago, on the site of the present Pacific Ocean, there was a huge continent Pacifis, named so by analogy with Atlantis (the Pacific Ocean in Latin sounds Pacific).
As a result of the Flood, the continent's plains were flooded - a surface of water was formed, which was later called the Pacific Ocean, and the tops of the mountains continue to stick out of the water in the form of archipelagos and separate islands. The commonality of the former continent, the supporters of this theory argue, explains the existence in America, Asia and Australia of the same species of animals, the similarity of the cult traditions of the peoples living there.
Otherwise, how could people and animals get to, for example, Australia, if it is more than 15,000 km from the Pacific coast of South America?
The English ethnographer John McMillan Brown, a supporter of the admiral's theory, somewhat narrows the scope: there was not a continent, but a huge archipelago, which included islands from Fiji in the south and the Galapagos in the east to Hawaii in the north. It was he who was the connecting link between Asia and America.
Otherwise, he agrees with the admiral. The inhabitants of the continent (archipelago) had a developed civilization at that time, and the island of Rapa Nui, of little use for life, they used to build a kind of memorial to their dead leaders and gods, in whose honor they erected giant stone idols.
To solve these mysteries, large-scale geological and anthropological research is needed. But scientists do not lose hope that someday these studies will reveal the secret of the unique kohau rongo rongo.
Anatoly BUROVTSEV, Konstantin RISHES