The Rongorongo Script: On a Listed Sequence in the Recto of Tablet “Mamari”. Part II

Abstract

In Harris and Melka (2011a), we identified a fragment of text on the “Mamari” tablet (Cb) which echoes a short section of a verbal list-like formula recorded by Englert (1948) concerning the kills made by warriors during battle. We highlighted the possible correlation between “frigate bird” /600/ and “fish” /700/ glyphs and their presence in delimiter lists (Barthel, 1958; Horley, 2007) through an analysis based on the whole RR corpus, and a reduced corpus of texts, which we propose relate to the same literary genre; the ika and timo genres (see Routledge, 1919; Fischer, 1997). We presented the ethnographic data (Harris & Melka, 2011a), a Key Word In Context concordance, and explained the methods adopted for a further statistical analysis of these glyphs as a concordance is not normally used to demonstrate significance, without some statistical measure to support it.

In this paper, we present the final results, and demonstrate that there is some evidence to assume that these two glyphs /600/ and /700/ are highly correlated in other fragments of text across the RR corpus, as either separate constituents /600/ and /700/, with one or more intervening glyphs, or as part of a compound form /605/, or /606/, requiring the “hand” glyph /006/ to appear before the “fish” glyph /700/.

Furthermore, we propose that these glyphs suggest the presence of îka lists – a record of warriors killed in battle – and timo – vengeance chants imbued with the power to bring death upon the named victim. What these inscription types share are the presence of proper names, which may be indexed by glyphs /430/ and /530/ previously identified by Davletshin (2002), as possible “title” glyphs.

Although this study highlights many observations made by previous research (Pozdniakov, 1996; Guy, 1998; Davletshin, 2002; Horley, 2007) through palaeographic methods and frequency analysis, this paper attempts to take this further by adopting multivariate methods from lexicographic and latent semantic statistical methods. These methods are useful for reducing noise created by an inadequate transliteration scheme (Barthel, 1958), and issues associated with frequency analyses over a corpus of texts of variable length. The results in this paper also show these methods correspond to observations made by previous analyses based on palaeographic methods.

Acknowledgments

This paper would not be possible without the work of so many dedicated researchers of the rongorongo tradition both past and present. Specifically we would like to acknowledge the open debate and advice from Gabriel Altmann, Paul Horley, Richard W. Sproat, and to the open source community including Stefan Th. Gries, Stefan Evert, Marco Baroni, Harald Baayen, and Fridolin Wild for contributing their algorithms to the R repository (see http://www.r-project.org).

Notes

¹The probability type distribution estimates the probability that a particular word w falls into a certain word frequency rank, i.e. the number of words that occur 1, 2, 3 … n times in a text. See Tweedie and Baayen (2000), Baayen (2001), Evert (2004), Evert and Baroni (2005).

²Texts Nb, Da, and Db have joined the group containing texts Ia and Ta (right-hand chart). Raw frequency counts reveal that this is caused by a number of shared-glyphs between the texts. This may be caused by the removal of the delimiters, allowing for common sequences to be more apparent. Raw data is available from the authors.

³For brevity we have presented the discourse maps as they are; however, the raw data can be obtained on request from the authors.

⁴See Barthel (1978 1974, p. 151), “The frigate bird was the emblem of the Miru tribe and as such the emblem (or maybe even totem?) of nobility in general. Petroglyphs of the frigate bird (glyph /600/ according to Barthel 1971, p. 1173) in the Rano Ruraku area appear almost intrusive, like a triumphant sign of victory ( … )”; and Campbell (1971, p. 387), “Debe destacarse del testimonio de Mrs. Routledge que sólo los hombres tenían acceso a las escuelas de ‘Rongo-rongo’ y que entre ellos era la tribu Miru la de los más altos ‘maorí’ o ‘sabios’.” [It should be emphasized the testimony of Mrs. Routledge that only males had access to “Rongo-rongo” schools, and that among them the Miru tribe was the one with the utmost “māori” or “sages”].

⁵Caution should be applied in this context. See Jackson (1984, p. 60): “ … the very raison d'être for the symbols: their power of reference to something over and above their actual design.”

⁶See Barthel (1971, p. 1172), who refers to this as “a residue of syntax …”, and Barthel (1993, p. 175): “For chants that could be entrusted to memory and tested it sufficed to record simple key words – i.e. to utilize a minimal syntax (action/actor/object or location).” Barthel's “ideographic” approach has been disputed by Fischer (1997, pp. 229–230) and Pozdniakov and Pozdniakov (2007).

⁷Brown (1979 1924, p. 286) in “Appendix to Chapter XXIV: The Language” presents a short selection of words in Māori and in the Easter Island dialect. In Māori the entry “matatoa” is rendered as “fearless”, while in the Eastern Island dialect, it is rendered as “conqueror”.

⁸The current whereabouts of the Small St Petersburg Tablet is the Kunstkamera, St Petersburg, Russia. However, the object appears to have been temporarily misplaced. The update owes to the inquiries of the Russian scholar Albert Davletshin (10 December 2010).