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Rongorongo ( or ; Rapa Nui: roŋoroŋo ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that has the appearance of writing or proto-writing.

Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of the glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing and to be an independent invention, it would be one of very few inventions of writing in human history. Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a tangata manu statuette, and two reimiro ornaments. There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred. Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as glyphs 200 and 280 , have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing eyes. Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The (somewhat variable) names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.

Rongorongo is the modern name for the inscriptions. The original name—or perhaps description—of the script is said to have been kōhau motu mo roŋoroŋo, "lines incised for chanting out", shortened to kōhau roŋoroŋo or "lines chanting out".

Rongorongo glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedon, left to right and bottom to top.

The start of forest-clearing for agriculture on Easter Island, and thus presumably the first settlements on the island, has been dated to circa 1200, implying a date for the invention of rongorongo no earlier than the 13th century. The glyphs could be crudely written rongorongo, as might be expected for Rapa Nui representatives writing with the novel instrument of pen on paper.

But the sequence does not appear to have been carved in a single hand (see image at right), and the cave is near the house that produced the Poike tablet, a crude imitation of rongorongo, so the Ana o Keke petroglyphs may not be authentic.

From them Routledge concluded that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device that did not directly represent language, in other words, proto-writing, and that the meanings of the glyphs were reformulated by each scribe, so that the kōhau rongorongo could not be read by someone not trained in that specific text.

The 26 rongorongo texts with letter codes are inscribed on wooden objects, each with between 2 and 2320 simple glyphs and components of compound glyphs, for over 15,000 in all. There are in addition a few isolated glyphs or short sequences which might prove to be rongorongo.

Most texts remained beyond the reach of would-be decipherers until 1958, when Thomas Barthel published line drawings of almost all the known corpus in his Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift ("Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island script") which remains the fundamental reference to rongorongo.

There are three serious obstacles to decipherment, assuming rongorongo is truly writing: the small number of remaining texts, the lack of context such as illustrations in which to interpret them, and the poor attestation of the Old Rapa Nui language, since modern Rapa Nui is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is therefore unlikely to closely reflect the language of the tablets.

Quick Facts

• If rongorongo does prove to be writing and to be an independent invention, it would be one of very few inventions of writing in human history.
• There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short rongorongo inscriptions.
• Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon.
• In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood.
• Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Rongorongo". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.