Due to greedy slave traders and terrible diseases, the unique Rapanui people almost disappeared by the end of the 19th century.
Easter Island from a height of 61 km.
The almost instantaneous decline of culture on Easter Island leads to the loss of an interesting heritage - the original writing of the Paschal people. It is believed that the last of the islanders, who owned the ancient Rongo-rongo, died in 1866.
Bishop E. Eiro was the first to inform the public about the "talking tablets". In 1862, they lay in almost any hut, but in a couple of years most of the kohau rongo-rongo tablets disappeared in the fire. The Rapanui legends say that the first settlers brought 67 tablets with ancient inscriptions with them for Easter. Today there are only 18 surviving texts, of which 7 are considered badly damaged. Thanks to N. Miklouho-Maclay, a couple of samples of cohau rongo-rongo came to Russia.
Surprisingly, the rongo-rongo hieroglyphs are still considered unreadable. Many theories about the unknown are being built around the tablets …
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The farthest in the study of this writing has advanced Russian scientists. Interesting results on deciphering texts from Easter Island were obtained by I. K. Fedorova, who works as a researcher at the MAE RAS. Her work even made it onto Chilean television, since Easter Island belongs to this country.
According to Irina Konstantinovna, this writing is based on the principle of "homographic hieroglyphics". The signs on the plates often denote not the object that we observe in the picture, but a completely different object. Homonyms helped Rapanui people symbolically depict things or concepts that are difficult to express in a simple drawing, reducing the number of signs used in writing.
Using this principle, Fedorova tried to correctly identify the required object, sometimes bumping into incredible combinations in her work. For example, the fish symbol in the texts denoted a local plant, and the symbol with the heavens denoted sugar cane. By 1998, the talented scientist deciphered the tablets brought by Miklouho-Maclay. The results of painstaking work can be read in the monograph "Talking Plates" from Easter Island."
Fedorova notes that the complexity of decryption was the impossibility of using a computer or previously existing standard approaches in their business. The main tool of the scientist is intuition, intelligence and the ability to subtly feel the language of the Rapanui people. The texts of the mystical chants of the islanders are primitive in meaning, but up to 800 characters were used to write them.
Most of the deciphered tablets tell about economic activities, the cult of worshiping ancestors, magic rituals to increase fertility.
Fedorova's results are disputed by the Pozdnyakov linguists. Father and son had their own idea of how to read rongo rongo. They admit the existence of only 52 characters in this letter, which is in excellent agreement with the number of syllables in the Paschal language. By the joint efforts of scientists using different methods, the surviving sacred texts of the islanders are close to final deciphering, which means that even more mysteries of Easter Island will soon be revealed.
