Rongorongo, the lost script of Easter Island

Easter Island, the remote Pacific outpost its inhabitants call Rapa Nui, is not only the island of the moai. On a few wooden tablets survives an indigenous script, rongorongo, which no one can read any longer. About two dozen genuine objects remain, scattered among museums and collections around the world, from Santiago de Chile to Rome, from London to Saint Petersburg.

Discovery and dispersal

The first European to report the tablets was the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud, who in 1864 wrote that he had seen them in many dwellings on the island. A few years later the bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne Jaussen, received some and tried to have them interpreted by an islander living in Tahiti, but obtained inconsistent readings, which were probably recitations of texts other than those written.

The context was tragic. In 1862 raids by Peruvian slave traders had carried off a large part of the population, and the epidemics that followed killed many more. With them, in all likelihood, disappeared the specialists able to read and recite the texts. By the time scholars began to take an interest in the tablets, the tradition that explained them had already been broken.

A reverse boustrophedon script

The signs depict human figures, birds, fish, plants and geometric shapes, carefully carved into the wood, probably with shark teeth or obsidian tools. The lines follow the system known as reverse boustrophedon: at the end of each line the reader had to turn the tablet through one hundred and eighty degrees to continue, because the next line is upside down relative to the previous one.

The longest text is carved on the so-called Santiago Staff, kept in Chile. Scholars have identified sequences repeated on different objects and at least one tablet that seems to contain a lunar calendar. The meaning of most texts, however, remains unknown, and it is not even clear whether rongorongo fully transcribes the spoken language or serves as a memory aid for recitation.

Before or after European contact?

The most debated question concerns its origin. Some scholars have argued that rongorongo arose after the Spanish visit of 1770, when the island's chiefs were asked to sign a document of annexation, as an imitation of European writing. Others regard it as an independent invention, which would make it one of the very few scripts created from nothing in human history.

In 2024 a study radiocarbon-dated the wood of some tablets kept in Rome and found that one of the samples dates from the fifteenth century. The result gives the age of the tree, not necessarily that of the carving, but it seriously reopens the hypothesis of a script that predates the arrival of Europeans. Further analyses will be needed to turn the clue into a conclusion.

Rongorongo is a rare case: a script developed on an island thousands of kilometres from any continent, and lost within a single generation. Every surviving tablet is a fragment of memory still waiting for its key, and a reminder of how quickly knowledge can vanish when the people who kept it disappear.