Rongorongo

Polynesia’s only writing, and the people who could read it were taken in 1862

Rongorongo is a script of small carved glyphs, about a centimetre high, found on wooden tablets from Rapa Nui, Easter Island: outlines of people, animals, plants, objects and geometric shapes, many of the figures with odd knobs on either side of the head that may be eyes. No one can read a single one. Some calendar information, and perhaps genealogies, have been picked out, but the glyphs themselves remain silent, and if rongorongo proves to be true writing invented on the island, it is one of very few independent inventions of writing in human history.

It reads strangely. The lines run in reverse boustrophedon: start at the bottom left, read to the right, then turn the tablet a half-circle and carry on, so that the neighbouring lines always stand upside down. The name means something like "to recite or chant", and the original phrase may have been kōhau motu mo roŋoroŋo, lines incised for chanting. Oral tradition says scribes cut the glyphs with obsidian flakes or shark teeth on precious wood while pupils practised on banana leaves, and that only a small elite of ruling families and priests could read them. Wood was scarce, so the scribes used irregular, often blemished pieces whole, including driftwood and even European oars.

The script entered the written record in 1864, when the missionary Eugène Eyraud reported tablets and staffs covered in hieroglyphic characters, hundreds of them, kept without interest by their owners. Four years later the Bishop of Tahiti, Tepano Jaussen, was sent a cord of human hair wound round a small inscribed board and asked for all the tablets to be collected, but only a few could be found. The Peruvian slave raids, the last and worst in 1862, and the smallpox that followed had carried off the island's wise men and cut the population to under two hundred by the 1870s. One survivor told the bishop that no one was left who could read the characters, so the islanders burned the boards for firewood or wound fishing lines round them. Some were cut into planks for a canoe.

About two dozen inscribed objects survive, scattered among museums and collections; none remains on the island. How old the script is has been argued for a century, and some scholars suspected it was inspired by a Spanish visit in 1770. In 2024 researchers led by Silvia Ferrara radiocarbon-dated four tablets kept in Rome and found that the wood of one was felled between 1493 and 1509, more than two centuries before Europeans arrived. The wood's age is not the carving's, but if the date holds, the islanders may have invented writing on their own.