Rongo rongo, one of three scripts of Easter Island, has remained a mystery since its discovery. It has not been deciphered despite attempts by many linguists, and claims of success by some of them which invariably resulted in ridicule by peer scientists. Just 21 wooden tablets remain bearing the script.

A Hungarian scholar and author of several books, Wilhelm or Guillaume de Hevesy , in 1932 called attention to the apparent similarities between some of the rongo-rongo characters of Easter Island and those of the prehistoric script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, correlating dozens (at least 40) of the former with corresponding signs on seals from Mohenjo-daro. This correlation was republished in later books, for example by Z.A. Simon (1984: 95). Rongo-rongo may mean peace-peace, and the texts may record peace treaties, possibly between the long ears and the conquering short ears.

Alternatively, Steven Fischer interprets the rongo-rongo texts as litanies (so to speak) of mystical couplings between forces of nature. He suggests that the islanders developed the script after encountering writing when a Spanish ship called at Easter Island in 1770.

Martha Macri of the University of California at Davis, who has also worked on the Mayan script, suggests that the majority of the apparently large number of glyphs are in fact compounds of a much more limited set of basic elements. The number of these elements, around 70, suggests that Rongorongo may be a syllabary augmented by a small number of logograms, as 50 glyphs would be required for a pure syllabary of nine consonants and five vowels (9x5 consonant-vowel syllables plus 5 vowel-only syllables). The suspected logograms, which don't form compounds, are also found in petroglyphs around the island. The number of elements per compound (1 to 4 or 5, averaging about 2) suggests that each compound might represent a word, rather like European cursive scripts. If the script is a syllabary, and especially if it's divided into words, this would suggest that the idea for writing came from European explorers through contact diffusion, as Fischer suggested. [When people are exposed to the idea of phonetic writing, without actually understanding the alphabetic system, and then set out to create scripts of their own, they usually create syllabaries. E.g., Cherokee of the US, Vai of Liberia, Afaka of Suriname. However, the few cases we have of scripts created ex nihilo in ancient times (Sumerian/Egyptian/Elamite [whichever came first], Chinese, Olmec/Mayan) are all logographic systems.]

It has also been suggested that rongo-rongo is not a writing system proper but is a genealogical record , a calendar, a mnemonic system or a choreography.

External links

• DMoz category
• Steven Roger Fischer, "Easter Island's Rongorongo Script"
• www.rongorongo.org has the entire known corpus of rongorongo texts and information on current advances in decipherment