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

Abstract

Rongorongo, the undeciphered writing system of Rapanui (Easter Island) has received a lot of attention in the last 12 months with new studies tackling the “Mamari” (see Horley, 2009a; Melka, 2010a) and the “Keiti” tablets (see Horley, 2010; Wieczorek, 2011). The “Mamari” section is a potential “lunar series” (see Barthel, 1958a; Barthel, 1971, p. 1183; Guy, 1990); however more work is needed to ascertain whether “Keiti” reflects to some extent the same genre. In this study we look to other inscriptions in the corpus for the possible presence of the îka and timo genres (see Routledge, 1919; Fischer, 1997). After a review of the ethnographic data, in combination with a statistical analysis, we propose that one group of tablets that may reflect these genres are Gv, Ia, and Ta. The analysis focuses on a number of identified sequences that show examples of glyph /700/ across the rongorongo corpus. A mixed-methods approach has been adopted since it has the potential to coalesce advantages in terms of ethnography, text analysis and statistics. This is especially true when one has a lot of factors to consider, and errors tend to build up in the company of the unidentified data, of possibly contaminated folkloric and fragmented informants' material, of abstruse glyphic combinations, and of an imperfect system of transliteration (see Guy, 2006, p. 53).

Notes

¹See Appendix 1 (to appear in a subsequent portion of this study) on the classification and location of the rongorongo texts.

²For a comprehensive collection of literature covering LSA, visit: http://lsa.colorado.edu.

³Guy (1982, 2006) proposes that stacked glyphs should be read bottom-top from evidence derived from parallel passages.

⁴See Chauvet's (1935) section Carved Wooden Objects regarding Figures 90, 91, 93, 94; see also in Esen-Baur (1989, p. 217, Catalogue entry 34), a tahonga pendant made of toromiro wood kept at Etnografisk Museum, Oslo, Inv. Nr. 2441; and Orliac and Orliac (2008, pp. 196–226) on the collection of tahonga of the SSCC, Rome, Italy.

⁵See Fischer (1997, p. 556): “Because the Old Rapanui language, like all Polynesian languages, contains a large amount of homophonous words, one glyph with one fixed phonetic value was probably polysemous, too”.

⁶A number of authors have taken the position that rongorongo appears to be a mixed script (see Melka, 2009b).

⁷See Brown (1979 1924, p. 128): “They (the scribes, the priests, our note) had to etch copies of the old ritual and genealogies and traditions on new boards and show these every year to the king at a great review. They had to keep reciting these so that at the annual festival they should be letter-perfect. When a war or a battle occurred the warriors came to them and told them of all the men they had killed, and they had to put the number of all the victims (î k a) in permanent record, so they should go down to posterity, when they were recited at the festivals”; and Brown (1979 1924, p. 217): “None of the clans, not even the Miru, had a war deity; each had only a god for general purposes, though drawn by Hotu Matua's devices into acknowledging the Miru deity, Makemake, as supreme. It was in accordance with this that after a battle the warriors went to the maori and told the number of men they had slain so that he might record it in the kohauîka, or tablet of the victims”.

⁸“Aus den Überlieferungen der Osterinsel wissen wir nun, daß zwischen Fischen (=‘ika,) und Menschenopfern, ‘tangata ika’. d.h. Fischmenschen, eine Synonymität bestand, die wohl ganz Ozeanien gemeinsam war. Einige der Schrifttafeln behandeln anscheinend diese kannibalistischen Riten; eine Tafel war unter dem namen ‘ika’ bekannt, sie enthielt die Liste der an jeder Opferstätte, ‘ahu’, erschlagenen Menschen. Die Bildzeichen der Fische, welche die Fischer als Beute heimtragen sind mit der Zahl der erschlagenen Feinde zu identifizieren. Diese Menschenopfer waren mit Wahrscheinlichkeit die gegenseitigen Mitglieder der feindlichen Clans, deren Wohnverteilung auf der osterinsel bekannt war”. [From the transmitted traditions of Easter Island we now know that between the Fish (=“Ika”) and the sacrificed men “tangata ika”, that is, Fish-men, there was a synonymy standing in common probably for all Oceania. Some of the inscribed tablets apparently deal with these cannibalistic rituals; a tablet was known by the name “Ika”; it contained the lists of the slain men at each of these sacrificial sites called “ahu”. The sign-figures of fish, in which some fish are taken home as prey, are to be identified with the number of the slain enemies. These sacrificed men were most probably members of each of the hostile clans, whose dwellings were known all over Easter Island.]

⁹The triadic sequences are commonly found in the RR script; for more see Butinov and Knorozov (1957 1956), Fischer (1995), Pozdniakov (1996), Horley (2007) and Melka (2009b, 2009c).

¹⁰Evidence of this is apparent in Tregear (1891, pp. 103, 223, 225): matangohi, mataika, matamua, mataati, ika-o-te-ati, te ika a tiki “the first person killed or taken in a fight, victim, fish, prisoner”, (matá =  “obsidian”, nghohi, ika = “fish, victim”). Also of note is the parallel between ika and death in reika “Underworld” (re+ ika); see Tregear (1891, p. 407). In Māori: Ika hua rua “slaying of two men”, Ika-a-Whiro, “old and proved warrior” (Best, 1902, p. 133).

¹¹See Knoche (1939, p. 31): “Aber nicht allein auf der Osterinsel hat ‘ika’ neben der Bezeichnung ‘Fisch’ die Bedeutung des zum Mahl bestimmten Gegners oder seiner Opferung (‘victim’ und ‘sacrifice’); bei den Marquesanern ist ‘ika’ der gefürchtete Feind, auf Mangarewa der erste im Kampf Erschlagene und auf Mangaia, also bereits im heutigen polynesisch-melanesischen Grenzgebiet, wird wie auf Rapanui das Opfer so bennant”. [Besides its meaning of the word “fish”, not only on the Easter Island the term “ika” implies the description of the adversary who is supposed to be eaten or his “sacrifice”; for the Marquesans “ika” is the feared enemy. On Mangareva it is the one who was the first to be killed in the battle, and on Mangaia which is today in the Polynesian-Melanesian border territory it is used to describe the victim like in Rapanui] and Clerk (1985, p. 237), “The description of human sacrifices as ‘fish’ is certainly not restricted to Mangaia. Many other Polynesian societies employed similar imagery.”

¹²“The ‘frigate-bird’ is at the same time the symbol for the noble Miru and can thus assume an heraldic and sociological value, with the result that in suitable contexts RR 600 also means the group Miru”. See also Barthel (1963, p. 378).

¹³“It (the religion in Easter Island, our note) revolved around a deity who is sometimes assumed to be supreme, and creator of all things. His name is Makemake … He was really the special deity of the sacred clan of Hotu Matua, the Miru”. Likewise, Brown (1979 1924, p. 102) under the figure of a schematized frigate bird, inserts the caption: “The usual form that Makemake takes in the Script”.

¹⁴“En todo caso se ha aceptado unánimemente la existencia del Dios Creador Make Make, al cual dirigían cantos y especie de canciones. Tanto se destaca la figura de esta deidad en el pasado que muchos ensayistas han interpretado en ello un sentido monoteísta, poco común en un pueblo primitivo”. [In any case, it has been unanimously accepted the existence of Creator God Make Make, to whom the Pascuans dedicated chants and other sorts of songs. The role of this deity is so conspicuous that many writers have found in it a monotheistic meaning, rather uncommon in a primitive population.]

¹⁵A similar phenomenon is observed by Baines (2004, p. 164) in the ancient Egypt: “Since prestigious symbols are used as signs, these are likely to refer to prestigious entities like royal estate names”.

¹⁶See Barthel (1978 1974, p. 233): “… máta also refers to the political unit of a tribe on Easter Island”.

¹⁷McCoy (1979, p. 158) issues the following general pronouncement: “Some figures (RR glyphs, our note) may represent words, but here is no conclusive proof of complete sentences or a grammar”.

¹⁸Suspicious as we are to the importance of “Metoro Chants” (see also Guy, 1999), we tend to favour Barthel's (1993, p. 175) opinion: “The Metoro Chants are in fact no Rosetta Stone; but they remain of heuristic value and likewise ought not to be neglected by future investigations”.

¹⁹Given the present state of affairs, and taking into consideration that /380.001-605.700x-605.700x-605.700x-670/ is a closed set of glyphs undocumented in the present form in other rongorongo sections, we are aware that any proposal, however astute it may be, will remain non-falsifiable.

²⁰Talking on decipherment of isolated fragments in different RR inscriptions, Pozdniakov (1996, p. 292) specifies: “Cette approche admet une lecture phonétique ou une interpretation sémantique d'un fragment très limité de texte …” [This approach admits a phonetic reading or a semantic interpretation of a very limited section of a text …]

²¹Our thanks go to Paul Horley for highlighting this inconsistency (September 2010).

²²For additional information on glyph /003/, we direct readership to Barthel (1989, p. 130), Horley (2005, p. 111), Guy (2006, p. 65), Pozdniakov and Pozdniakov (2007, p. 31), and de Laat (2009, p. 35).

²³“List-like” texts are those composed of identified delimiter glyphs, i.e. /380.001.003/, and /076/ (see Fischer, 1997; Horley, 2007).

²⁴If a process is Poisson-distributed, then the modified Bessel function provides the jumps between certain classes or types within a random process, which models a process where, for instance, an entity is travelling at a certain speed and randomly interrupted before proceeding in the same manner (see Steutel, 1985). In Lavenda (2000), the modified Bessel function is used to calculate the random transition of a particle based on its velocity, represented as intervals along a scale with the observations taken at certain points. For our purposes, the modified Bessel function of the second kind provides the distribution for the type population S (see Tweedie & Baayen, 2000, p. 1).

²⁵Supplementary data will be available online. Please contact the authors.