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Easter Island - Indus Valley Scripts:

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Major Weatherly
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« on: August 31, 2015, 12:37:44 am »

The Origin of Rongorongo:

Tradition says the the first king, Hoatu-matua, brought with him sixty-seven wooden tablets. Later on, the number of tablets is supposed to have been much larger. From one of the last chiefs, Ngaara, it is told that he had several hundreds. Radiocarbon dating has shown that the dates for the decline of tree pollen,  and therefore the first settlement, began around AD 900, or possibly a couple of centuries earlier (4).  The **** of statues was in full swing by AD 1,200 and the collapse came around AD 1,500. Natives tell that the original glyphs brought by the first immigrants, had been written on paper made from the banana plant; but later on, for the better preservation of the documents they were written on wood. According to Eyraud and Geiseler the glyphs were engraved with a piece of obsidian; but Routledge and Metraux mention catfish teeth as instruments for engraving. (2)

The Austronesian Polynesians, who first settled the island, are likely to have arrived from the Marquesas Islands from the west. (3) The island at one time supported a relatively advanced and complex civilization.  We now know that the Between about 3,000 and 1,000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through island South-East Asia – almost certainly starting out from Taiwan In the mid-2nd millennium BC the distinctive Lapita culture appeared suddenly in north-west Melanesia. Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Tonga and Samoa. In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture developed. The pattern of settlement that is believed to have occurred is that the Polynesians spread out from the Samoan Islands into eastern Polynesia - the Marquesas, the Society Islands, the Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island. (5)

Although Easter Island was first officially discovered by Europeans in 1722, it is clear that the Pacific was being successfully navigated for thousands of years before their arrival.

The first record of Rongorongo was by Eugène Eyraud in 1864. He remained on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing the inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay in which he reports his discovery of the tablets that year:

    'In every hut one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters: They are depictions of animals unknown on the island, which the natives draw with sharp stones. Each figure has its own name; but the scant attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now for them a habitual practice which they keep without seeking its meaning'

    — Eyraud 1866:71

In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti received a gift from the recent Catholic converts of Easter Island. It was a long cord of human hair, a fishing line perhaps, wound around a small wooden board covered in hieroglyphic writing. Stunned at the discovery, he wrote to Father Hippolyte Roussel on Easter Island to collect all the tablets and to find natives capable of translating them. But Roussel could only recover a few, and the islanders could not agree on how to read them. What happened to the hundreds of tablets seen only four years before is a matter of conjecture. Steven Chauvet reported the following:

    'The Bishop questioned the Rapanui wise man, Ouroupano Hinapote, the son of the wise man Tekaki [who said that] he, himself, had begun the requisite studies and knew how to carve the characters with a small shark's tooth. He said that there was nobody left on the island who knew how to read the characters since the Peruvians had brought about the deaths of all the wise men and, thus, the pieces of wood were no longer of any interest to the natives who burned them as firewood or wound their fishing lines around them'... ...'A. Pinart also saw some in 1877. He was not able to acquire these tablets because the natives were using them as reels for their fishing lines'.

    — Chauvet 1935:
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