Easter Island May Have Independently Developed A Written Script

The people of Easter Island may have independently developed their own written script in a language that is now lost. The script is undeciphered.

A tablet of wood inscribed with the undeciphered "rongorongo" script from the Eastern Pacific island Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, predates the arrival of Europeans there, strengthening the likelihood that the script is one of the few independently invented writing systems. The wood from one of four rongorongo tablets preserved in a collection in Rome dates to between 1493 and 1509 — more than 200 years before the first recorded arrival of Europeans on the island in the 1720s[.] . . . the results support the idea that rongorongo was an original invention by the Rapa Nui islanders rather than being influenced by the writing they'd seen used by Europeans.

Rapa Nui, which sits nearly 2,400 miles (3,800 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, was settled by humans between 1150 and 1280. Although Europeans arrived in the 18th century, they didn't notice the local glyph-based script until 1864, which now exists on only 27 wooden objects, none of which are still on the island. Catholic missionaries took four of these tablets in 1869 and sent them to the bishop of Tahiti, who later sent them to Europe.

Ferrara and her colleagues conducted radiocarbon dating on tiny samples of the four rongorongo tablets held by a congregation of Catholic nuns based in Rome. The radiocarbon dates suggested that three of the tablets were made from trees felled in the 18th or 19th centuries, but the radiocarbon date of a fourth indicated it came from a tree felled in the 15th century, Ferrara said. That predates the arrival of Europeans on Rapa Nui and suggests that the rongorongo script was in use before then, she said.

(Image credit: INSCRIBE and RESOLUTION ERC Teams) 

In this case, however, the inscription was probably made about the time the wood was obtained, because the alternative explanation — that the wood had been stored for more than 200 years before it was used — seems unlikely, she said. The new analysis also suggested the wood from the oldest tablet came from a tree species not native to Rapa Nui, and the researchers think it was probably a piece of driftwood.

Rapa Nui is famous for its many archaeological mysteries, including the giant stone heads known as moai, and many people have tried — without success — to decipher the rongorongo script.

Ferrara said more than 400 different rongorongo glyphs have been recognized among the roughly 15,000 surviving characters, and none correspond to any other known system of writing.

Rafal Wieczorek, a chemist at the University of Warsaw who was not involved in the latest study but has investigated other rongorongo tablets, said that while the new research isn't conclusive, it is a strong indication that the script was an independent invention — perhaps one of only a handful of times when a writing system had been invented from scratch, without knowledge of other writing systems. . . . "I actually believe that rongorongo is one of the very few independent inventions of writing in human history, like the writing of the Sumerians, the Egyptians and the Chinese," he said. "But belief is a different thing than hard data … so ideally, we would like to test all the tablets."

From Live Science.

Given that only sample on "old wood" was driftwood anyway, the possibility that the script is not as ancient as the date of the wood suggests is less of a stretch than it might seem. It wouldn't have to have been stored for 200 years. It would be enough for it to have lingered where it originally fell for decades and then for it to have drifted to Easter Island much later.

The fact that the script didn't spread elsewhere in Polynesia when it was known to have some level of trade with it is also a challenge to the notion that the script was developed independently in the late 15th or early 16th centuries.

But, the age of the wood makes it at least possible that the script predates European contact, and the lack of any connection to other known scripts is also an important factor favoring its status as an independent script.

Wikipedia covers it at length here. It notes that: "some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of these glyphs can actually be read. . . . Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred." It states that the conventional view is that this is a proto-language mnemonic device, which students wrote on fragile banana leaves, rather than a true language. Unlike other proto-linguistic scripts, like the Harappan script (of the Indus River Valley) and Vinca script (of the Balkans), and early hieroglyphs, however, this one does not appear to have had a primarily economic purpose.

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

Placing the origin of an undeciphered script in time is crucial to understanding the invention of writing in human history. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, developed a script, now engraved on fewer than 30 wooden objects, which is still undeciphered. Its origins are also obscure. Central to this issue is whether the script was invented before European travelers reached the island in the eighteenth century AD. Hence direct radiocarbon dating of the wood plays a fundamental role. Until now, only two tablets were directly dated, placing them in the nineteenth c. AD, which does not solve the question of independent invention. Here we radiocarbon-dated four Rongorongo tablets preserved in Rome, Italy. One specimen yielded a unique and secure mid-fifteenth c. date, while the others fall within the nineteenth c. AD. Our results suggest that the use of the script could be placed to a horizon that predates the arrival of external influence.

Ferrara, S., Tassoni, L., Kromer, B. et al. "The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script." 14 Sci Rep 2794 (Feb. 2, 2024) (open access) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53063-7