Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Text

by Steven Roger Fischer

This book is the first comprehensive documentation of Rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script and Oceania's only known pre-twentieth-century writing system. The author tells the full history of rongorongo's exciting discovery and the many attempts at a decipherment and provides full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving rongorongo inscriptions along with detailed photographs of nearly every incised artifact.

736 pages, Hardcover

First published March 5, 1998

Reviews

[Benjamin Wilkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This doorstopper is the definitive English-language resource about Rongorongo, the famous and mysterious writing system of the Rapanui people of Easter Island in the South Pacific. (Yes, the giant stone head people.) Rongorongo bears little visual resemblance to any other modern script (though some of its glyphs do look a little like emoji, if you squint hard) and remains officially undeciphered; though, as this book explains, scholars are fairly certain about the subject matter contained in the few surviving inscriptions. Nothing terribly ancient or revelatory there, unfortunately.

As you might guess from the page count, this book is excruciatingly detailed, covering everything from the probable origins of Rongorongo in 1770 (due to contact with Spanish colonialists), to its extinction as a living writing system in the 1860s (due to societal collapse from, among other things, colonial interference, epidemics, and slave raiding), and its afterlife in the annals of scholarship, fantasy, and idle speculation. Probably few readers will actually be interested enough in all of this to devour the entire book, cover to cover; my advice would be to start with the handy, summarized Conclusion starting on page 552 to get a reasonable overview, and then jump to whatever topics interest you.

While not an easy read, the book is more comprehensible than many products of academia - at least it doesn't require a thesaurus to comprehend (most of the time). The author explains his subject matter well, and isn't above adding tinges of humor and sarcasm, particularly when dismissing the theories of the many fantasists who have latched onto Rongorongo over the years. Illustrations of most of the remaining Rongorongo artifacts are included towards the end of the book, as well as transcriptions of the writing inscribed upon them. My only complaint in that area is that the book doesn't contain a complete syllabary of the writing system; much of the book could be more easily comprehended if a foldout of all 120 Rongorongo glyphs was included for the reader to consult.

In short, this book can easily serve as a standard for monographs of defunct writing systems. Perhaps there will be companion volumes about the Indus Valley script and Minoan Linear A, someday.