The Easter Island Tablets by Jacques B.M. Guy

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and with its unique writing system (known as Rongo­rongo), has provided such fertile breeding ground for various crackpot theories, from sunken continents to alien visitors, that a short introduction is necessary.

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What Then, Do We Know?

Very little. We will probably never know what the tablets mean: too few have survived. Let us then be content with the little of which we can be sure.

Each tablet was prepared before carving. Shallow grooves were cut lengthwise, probably using an adze with a blade of shell or of obsidian. They are 10 to 15mm wide, and can be clearly seen in a photo pp.64­65 of Catherine and Michel Orliac's excellent little book. The signs themselves were engraved in those grooves, probably with shark teeth or obsidian flakes, as oral tradition has it.

Of the 21 tablets we have, three bear almost exactly the same hieroglyphic text. A fourth one, called "Tahua" or "The Oar" bears only part of that text, and in a very different, more lapidary, style. Indeed this tablet is an oar made of European ash, as were used in the British navy two centuries ago. At the earliest, it could date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, at the latest, from the end of the nineteenth. There must therefore have been then literate Easter Islanders, because this "Oar" is not a mere copy. It looks like a compilation, a digest of earlier texts, lost, except for its beginning, found on those other three tablets (see "On a Fragment of the Tahua Tablet" in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, December 1985).

The overwhelming majority of the hieroglyphs are anthropomorphic. They are little figures, facing you, or sideways; standing with dangling arms; or sitting with their legs sometimes stretched, sometimes crossed; with a hand up, or down, or turned to the mouth; some hold a staff, some a shield, some a barbed string. Some sport two bulging eyes (or are they ears, or coils of hair?); some a huge hooked nose with three hairs on it; some have the body of a bird. The writing often looks like an animated cartoon. You can see the same little fellow repeated in slightly different postures. One tablet shows the same figure in three successive postures, sitting sideways, playing, it seems, with a top. Or is it a potter at the wheel? A jeweller with a drill, making shell beads?



There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds especially, fish and lizards less often. The most frequent figure looks very much like the frigate bird, which happens to have been the object of a cult, as it was associated with Make­Make, the supreme god.

When you compare the tablets which bear the same text, when you analyze repeated groups of signs, you realize that writing must have followed rules. The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next, but not in any old way. You could either carve a mannikin standing, arms dangling, followed by some other sign, or the same mannikin holding that sign with one hand. You could either carve a simple sign (a leg, a crescent) separate from the next, or rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and carve the next sign on top of it.

All we can reasonably hope to decipher some day is some two to three lines of the tablet commonly called "Mamari". You can clearly see that they have to do with the moon. We happen to have several versions of the ancient lunar calendar of Easter Island. The most interesting was collected by William Thomson in 1886, whose report was published by the American National Museum in 1889, in a monograph "Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island". Thanks to Thomson, we know for instance that the night called "kokore tahi" corresponded to 27 November 1886. Using an almanac of 1886 or astronomical software, we can match his list against the actual phases of the moon at the time of his stay on Easter Island, and use this comparison as a key to deciphering the hieroglyphs of the calendar (see " The lunar calendar of Tablet Mamari", Journal de la Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1990). Thomson also collected the names of the months with the corresponding dates in our calendar. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, the traditional Easter Island year corresponding to 1885­1886 happened to have 13 months, whereas all other authors reported only 12 months. By calculating the dates of the phases of the moon in 1885 and 1886 we can reconstruct this ancient calendar and, to a certain extent, how it worked, and when the extra month ("embolismic month" in technical jargon) had to be inserted (see "A propos des mois de l'ancien calendrier pascuan", Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1992). Some day, perhaps, someone will discover a tablet the hieroglyphs of which are the names of the months, or which contains the rules for deciding when this thirteenth embolismic month was to be inserted.

I have mentioned failed attempts at decipherment. Many have claimed that the Easter Island hieroglyphs are the spit image of the writing of this or that extinct civilization, from India to the Andes, and made the Easter Islanders their descendants. First, this is untrue. The Easter Island hieroglyphs have a distinct style, unique in the world. Second, this is downright silly. There are not a million different ways of drawing a "mannikin standing", a "fish", a "staff", a "bow", an "arrow". Ask a four­year old to draw you a "man with a stick" and compare that with the hieroglyphs of Easter Island. You are sure to find a few that look very much like that "man with a stick". Does that make the child an heir to the ancient Easter Islanders?

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