Rongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that has the appearance of writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, but none have been successful.
Four tablets were sent to a congregation in Rome for preservation, where they remained for over 150 years.
Until now, it was presumed that the Rongorongo script was composed of elements introduced by foreigners. But a team of scientists from Italy and Germany recently found reason to believe the elaborate language predates any European colonization, and it comes with extraordinary anthropological implications.
Of the four preserved tablets, radiocarbon dating of the wood determined that three of the tablets were created with trees grown in the 18th or 19th century. Surprisingly, though, the radiocarbon date of the fourth tablet indicated it came from a 15th-century tree—more than 200 years before Europe’s arrival on the island and before the wood was shipped for preservation.
This radiocarbon dating analysis of the wood suggests Rongorongo is an ancient language completely indigenous to Rapa Nui and perhaps even that it was intentionally kept secret from outsiders until the mid-19th century. If so, this would be an example of a previously unknown language—a rare writing system invented without any influence or prior knowledge of other writing.
Dating the emergence of Rongorongo is also difficult because philologists debate what type of script it is. It’s unclear whether Rongorongo is a form of proto-writing or a fully fledged system. It contains an astounding number of pictographic characters—more than 15,000—depticing animals, plants, geometric shapes, and anthropomorphic figures. It’s written in horizontal lines resembling sentences, but in a unique style called reverse boustrophedon, where every other line is upside down.
To this day, Rongorongo is considered undecipherable. Its use was mostly restricted to Indigenous priests, who were eventually captured in the Peruvian invasion, and no one familiar with reading the scripts has since been found.
