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Easter Island: land of mystery

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Kara Sundstrom
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« Reply #30 on: July 06, 2009, 12:46:08 am »

Rapa Nui

In the 19th century, missionaries and their Polynesian companions from French Oceania began to refer to Easter Island as Rapa Nui, meaning Great Rapa. Rapa Iti, Little Rapa, is an island southeast of Tahiti. On Rapa Iti a tradition survived claiming that the island had been settled by pregnant women escaping from massacres on Easter Island, known to them as Rapa Nui. Both islands are about the same size, but the names would be understandable if the migrants named the island they settled on after their original homeland. There is only one other island in the world called Rapa, and it is about the same distance from Easter Island but in the opposite direction: Rapa Island in Lake Titicaca. There are no stone statues on Rapa Iti, but many around Lake Titicaca, and the one on Rapa Island depicts a man with long ears.

One of the former names for Easter Island is the ‘navel of the world’. The megalithic Incan capital in Peru was called Cuzco – meaning ‘navel’. The same name was applied in ancient times to many other sacred places. Another name for Easter Island was Mate-ki-te-rangi, ‘eyes looking at heaven’ – a reference to the fact that, when their eyes were fitted, the moai seemed to be looking upwards at the sky. Rangi reappears elsewhere in Polynesia as rani and ani, and is commonly used also as a poetic reference to the legendary Polynesian fatherland. Mata-rani, ‘eyes of heaven’, is the name of an ancient aboriginal port on the south coast of Peru, just below Lake Titicaca.1 It is also similar phonetically and semantically to the Egyptian ‘maat Ra’, meaning essentially ‘the eye of the sun’.2
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