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When we think about the invention of writing, we generally think about Eurasia and Africa. It might bring to mind Mesopotamia in western Asia and the invention of cuneiform, or perhaps Egyptian hieroglyphics.
As a rule, we don’t think about isolated Pacific islands. But maybe we should. On Rapa Nui in the eastern Pacific, people carved symbols called Rongorongo onto wooden tablets. It has never been deciphered, but many linguists think it’s writing.
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Here is the thing. Europeans first noticed Rongorongo over a century after they first reached the island. So it has been suggested, even assumed, that the Rapa Nui people did not invent it independently, but got the idea from literate Europeans.
There is now tentative evidence that that story is wrong. One of the wooden Rongorongo tablets seems to be centuries old, meaning it dates from long before the European arrival. The implication is that Rongorongo is nothing less than an independent invention of writing – one that took place in a context drastically dissimilar to all the others where this milestone was passed. It is, as they say, huge if true.
This is one of those stories with a lot of moving parts. On the one hand, it’s about the technical questions of how old the Rongorongo scripts are and whether they qualify as writing. But it’s also about European prejudices against Indigenous cultures, especially during the colonial period – the consequences of which are still playing out today.
Portrayal of Rapa Nui
Rapa Nui is one of hundreds of islands dotted around the vast expanse of the Pacific. Known collectively as Polynesia, these were some of the last places to be settled by humans over the past 3000 years. The Polynesian peoples came from Asia, which lay to the west, and populated the islands from west to east. Rapa Nui, being the easternmost island, was the last to be settled. There’s uncertainty about the exact date but a 2020 study put it between AD 1150 and 1280.
It was a challenging place to live. Rainfall is erratic, so the inhabitants may have relied on freshwater springs under the sea for water. Nevertheless, they managed to create hundreds of stone statues of human figures, called moai. These were often erected on stone platforms called ahu.
The first Europeans arrived on the island on 5 April 1722: it was Easter Sunday, hence the island’s non-Indigenous name.
There is an almighty argument going on about what happened in the intervening centuries. In one account, the islanders over-exploited the island’s ecosystem, for instance through deforestation, leading to a steep population drop and widespread violence: a “collapse”. However, many anthropologists disagree. For instance, a 2021 genetic study found the population held steady for centuries, while archaeological evidence indicates the society was pretty peaceful.
I will definitively resolve this contentious dispute – just kidding, no I won’t. I bring it up to point out that the people of Rapa Nui have often been portrayed in a negative light, including being accused of ecocide.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the Rongorongo script. It consists of glyphs that resemble humans, animals, plants and other shapes engraved on wooden objects including boards, a staff and a statuette. Similar glyphs are carved on some of the rocks of Rapa Nui.
Rongorongo was written in a curious format. The top line of a tablet reads left to right, but the next line goes right to left and is also upside-down, so you have to keep turning the tablet over and over. “This is a unique characteristic that’s particular and unique to Rongorongo and no other known system of writing,” says Silvia Ferrara at the University of Bologna in Italy.
Rongorongo has never been deciphered. “It cannot be anything else but the local Rapa Nui dialect,” says Ferrara, but nobody has figured out how the glyphs correspond to the spoken sounds. It may be that it isn’t a fully developed writing system, in which all the sounds of the language are encoded, but rather “proto-writing” that only encodes aspects of the language and therefore can only be understood in some context – which we don’t have.
The key problem we face trying to understand Rongorongo is the limited sample size. Outsiders first noticed it in 1864, and over the next few years missionaries removed all known samples of the script from the island. None have been returned: some were destroyed, and the others are scattered around the world.
What’s more, the islanders stopped producing Rongorongo around this time. Slave raiders from Peru kidnapped many people and brought in diseases like tuberculosis. Knowledge of Rongorongo was lost.
The upshot is that all we have is 27 wooden objects with Rongorongo glyphs, housed in a range of countries. What are we to make of it?
Decoding Rongorongo
According to Ferrara, a common narrative has been that the Rapa Nui people only invented Rongorongo after meeting Europeans and seeing their writing. “I was quite suspicious of that,” she says. “Why would it be that you need European travellers in order to invent writing from zero?”
Of the 27 tablets, two had been radiocarbon dated by 2011. One seems to be from AD 1812-1836, the other from AD 1830-1870. This is well after European contact – but it’s only two samples.
Ferrara and her colleagues have now dated four more tablets, all held at the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Rome. They in Scientific Reports on 2 February. That’s over a month ago, but the study has gone somewhat under the radar. I’m therefore guessing that most of you haven’t seen it.
Two of the tablets have late dates similar to the ones dated before: AD 1862-1887 and AD 1832-1857 (with a slim chance of a date in the 1730s). The third one had a very wide range, AD 1694-1840 – potentially prior to European contact but also potentially not.
The fourth tablet is the one with the dramatic result: AD 1493-1509. That is two centuries before the arrival of Europeans. How should we interpret this?
Ferrara says she and her colleagues were careful to avoid contamination and other factors that could throw off the dating. “We are 100 per cent sure about the sample and we also are about 100 per cent sure of the dating of the sample,” she says.
However, the immediate problem is that radiocarbon dating of the wooden tablets tells us when the trees they came from were cut down. It doesn’t tell us when the Rongorongo was scratched into them – although Ferrara does note that centuries-old wood is often unsuitable for precise carving.
Another complication comes from the wood itself. In the early 2000s, botanist Catherine Orliac tried to identify the species of trees from which the tablets were carved. While many of the tablets were made from wood native to Rapa Nui, she tentatively concluded that the crucial tablet was made of broad-leaved yellowwood (Podocarpus latifolius). These trees are native to southern Africa and never grew on Rapa Nui.
It’s possible that Europeans took this piece of wood to the island, which would put them back into the story. It could also be that it reached Rapa Nui as driftwood. However, Ferrara says she is now working with botanist Michael Friedrich at the University of Hohenheim in Germany to re-analyse the wood. While it is probably Podocarpus, there are many species in the genus and some of them live around the Pacific. “More likely than not, this wood has been not identified with any certainty,” says Ferrara.
Of course, the central problem here is that the entire claim relies on the dating of one piece of wood. You never want a sample size of one. Ferrara is upfront about this and is actively trying to date more tablets.
It won’t be easy. “We’ve already been in touch with the Vienna Museum,” she says. Unfortunately, the tablets it has are covered in wax, which will cause contamination. Another tablet is held in a museum in St Petersburg, Russia: Ferrara says she won’t be getting access to that any time soon.
Meanwhile, the British Museum in London turned Ferrara down when she requested to study the Rongorongo tablet it holds, because it wants the people of Rapa Nui to be involved in any studies. This gets us back to the colonial-era impacts. The British Museum also has two moai, which were taken from the island in the 1860s. In February, a Chilean influencer named Mike Milfort launched a social media campaign, calling for the museum to return the statues. Ferrara is aware of this and plans to reach out to Rapa Nui leaders before travelling to the island in July.
The upshot here is that we cannot be certain of Rongorongo’s origins. We can’t quite rule out the idea that it was inspired by Europeans, but it’s distinctly possible that the Rapa Nui people invented it without any outside influence.
An independent invention of writing on Rapa Nui would be dramatic. We only know of four such inventions: in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. Readers with longish memories may recall that there is also evidence that the Inca of South America wrote, not with letters or symbols, but with knots in strings – and that a society in what’s now Peru may have used “semasiographic” writing in which the symbols represent concepts rather than sounds. Furthermore, “true” writing may have developed from simpler precursor systems, some of which were painted on cave walls and date back tens of thousands of years. Still, the known independent inventions of writing can be counted on your fingers.
Rapa Nui is not the sort of place where we would expect such an innovation. Societies like Egypt were all complex states with hierarchies, bureaucracies and cities, implying that the invention of writing was spurred by the challenge of running such a society. However, Rapa Nui was not a complex state, so if its people did invent writing, they did so for some other reason.
I plan on coming back to this topic. For now, I’m sad and angry that Europeans managed to destroy what may have been a unique writing system within years of finding it. But I’m also excited to follow what happens next with Rongorongo – and with rethinking the history of Rapa Nui.
