Rongorongo (;

Rapa Nui Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its nearly ...

: ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on

Easter Island Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its ne ...

that appears to be

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

proto-writing Proto-writing consists of visible marks communicating limited information. Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in Eastern Europe and China. They used ideograp ...

. Text E of the

rongorongo Rongorongo (Rapa Nui: ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that appears to be writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, with none being successful. Although some c ...

corpus, also known as ''Keiti'', is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.

Other names

E is the standard designation, from Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR6. Jaussen called it also ''vermoulue'' 'wormeaten'.

Location

Formerly in the library of the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. Pinart published rubbings, which are kept in the Bancroft Library of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Fischer (1997) says that the tablet survives in replicas made from casts. However, these replicas appear to have been of the Small Santiago; other than the rubbings, ''Keiti'' only survives in the two sets of photographs, one with white fill in the glyphs to make them more visible (Horley 2010).

Description

Destroyed during shelling of Leuven in 1914. Originally a fluted tablet of unknown wood, 39 × 13 cm, in beautiful condition but for some small wormholes esp. on recto, upper right side.

Provenance

One of Jaussen's tablets, ''Keiti'' was apparently collected on

by Fathers Roussel and Zumbohm in 1870 and sent to him in Tahiti. In 1888 Jaussen sent it to the headquarters of the '' Congrégation des Sacrés-Coeurs et de l'Adoration'' (SSCC) in Paris, with instructions to forward it to Charles-Joseph de Harlez de Deulin at the Catholic University at Louvain. It was sent in 1894, and stored in the university library, which was burnt down by the Germans in the siege of Louvain in 1914.

Content

This is one of the texts Metoro Taua Ure 'read' for Jaussen. However, he read the verso upside down, included the end of line 1 as part of line 2 and read it backwards, from right to left.

Text

Nine lines of glyphs recto, eight verso, for ~ 880 glyphs in all. Pozdniakov found a sequence of glyphs known from several other tablets that is split between lines Er9 and Ev1, confirming Barthel's reading order. Line 3 of the recto terminates prematurely, with its end wedged between lines 2 and 4, as seen also on the verso of '' Aruku.'' ;Barthel ;Fischer

Image gallery

Image:Rongorongo E-r Keiti raw.jpg, Recto (copy of original print) Image:Rongorongo_E-r_Keiti.jpg, Recto with white fill Image:Rongorongo E-v Keiti raw.jpg, Verso (copy of original print) Image:Rongorongo_E-v_Keiti.jpg, Verso with white fill

References

* BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1958. ''Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift'' (Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script). Hamburg : Cram, de Gruyter. * FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1997. ''RongoRongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts.'' Oxford and N.Y.: Oxford University Press. * HORLEY, Paul. 2010. "Rongorongo tablet Keiti". ''Rapa Nui Journal'' 24.1:45–5

* POZDNIAKOV, Konstantin. 1996. "Les Bases du Déchiffrement de l'Écriture de l'Ile de Pâques (The Bases of Deciphering the Writing of Easter Island)". ''

Journal de la Société des Océanistes A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...

'' 103 (2): 289–303. * POZDNIAKOV, Konstantin. 2011. "Tablet ''Keiti'' and calendar-like structures in Rapanui script". (preprin

External links

Barthel's coding of text E

Discovery of a copy of the photographs
{{Rongorongo Rongorongo inscriptions