Rongorongo script

Origin

The people of Easter Island were possibly inspired to invent the Rongorongo script after seeing the writing used by the Spanish when they annexed the island in 1770. The Easter Islanders were apparently impressed by the mana or power of the Spaniards' writing.

Rongorongo was used until the 1860s, after which knowledge of the script was lost. Nowadays most Easter Islanders write in Spanish using the Latin alphabet though a few try to write their own language, Rapanui, also with the Latin alphabet.

Since missionaries started visiting Easter Island in the 1860s, they have taken an interest in the mysterious Rongorongo symbols. A number of attempts have been made to decipher them, none of which have been completely successful, though in his book Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script, Steven Roger Fischer, Director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand, claims to have unlocked its mysteries.

Two other scripts were once used on Easter Island: Ta'u and Mama, but little is known about them as very few inscriptions have been found.

Notable features

• The Rongorongo script consists of about 120 symbols, mainly representations of birds, fish, gods, plants and a variety of geometric shapes.
• Some of the symbols represent whole words, some represent sounds and others represent abstract concepts.
• Rongorongo was used be priests to write a limited range of rhetorical statements and helped to reassert their authority.

The characters of the Rongorongo ancient written language of the southeast pacific island of Rapanui (also known as Easter Island) show great affnity to the also undeciphered ancient written script from the Indus Valley, of the archaic Harappan civilization, as noted by cutting-edge archaic language expert Andrew Robinson, however, he all but dismisses the obvious similarities of the scripts because of his timeline for their use; he rightly opines that the Harappan script, from northwest India and Pakistan, was from the circa 2000 B.C. timeframe, but wrongly opines that the script from Rapanui is only about 2,000 years old, apparently believing that the famous Easter Island moi head statues and the ancient Rongorongo script could not possibly have come about by sophisticated seafarers and megalithic builders during the time of the old kingdom Egyptian pharaohs and the Phoenicians of Sidon, when in fact, that’s the point, the Phoenicians, and the Harappans of the Rama empire, and the Egyptians, were navigating the globe in that timeframe, by the methodology in article #2 at http://IceAgeCivilizations.com, being enabled to sail to within 200 miles of Rapanui, from Harappa, or Egypt, or Sidon (from halfway around the globe) by merely sighting by the stars, pinpointing geographic locations to within a margin of 0.5%.

Much has been written about the observed similarities between south Asia's ancient Harappan script, and Easter Island's Rongorongo, an undeciphered writing system used by Polynesians on an island off the coast of Chile.