Saed News: The remote volcanic island of "Rapa Nui," also known as "Easter Island," is a place full of mysteries. Yet, one of the most enigmatic things on this island is its unique inscriptions, which no scholar has been able to decipher so far.
Saed News Society Report, quoting Razbeqa: This island is most famous for its giant stone statues called "Moai," carved by the people of Rapa Nui between 1100 and 1650 AD.
Rapa Nui Island lies about 3600 kilometers off the coast of Chile in eastern Polynesia and is one of the most remote uninhabited islands in the world.
The island is especially renowned for its colossal stone statues, "Moai," created by the Rapa Nui people during 1100 to 1650 AD.
When Europeans arrived on the island in the 18th century, they brought many problems, including disease and violence, and engaged in the slave trade involving the island's natives.
This situation worsened in the 19th century, and in the 1860s, a devastating blow was dealt to the island’s civilization and population when about 1500 islanders were abducted as slaves, leading to the permanent decimation of the island’s population.
By the end of the 19th century, a significant portion of the island’s traditional culture had been irreparably lost, including the use of an organized system of glyph symbols known as "Rongorongo," intricately carved on wooden tablets.
In 1864, during the peak of the islanders' massacre, outsiders discovered this writing system, and missionaries began shipping pieces of it by boat.
Today, only 27 wooden objects inscribed with Rongorongo remain, and no such writings are seen anymore on Rapa Nui Island.
Some of these tablets were sent to Europe, where researchers attempted to decode Easter Island’s script; however, all these efforts so far have been unsuccessful.
One of the most credible attempts was in the 1950s by Thomas Barthel, an ethnologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who identified 599 signs. Nonetheless, many contemporary scholars believe his findings cannot be conclusively confirmed.
What is clear is that the Rongorongo script has no obvious connection to any other known writing system and likely developed in complete isolation from other cultures.
A 2022 study by a team of Italian linguists stated: “The shapes and signs bear no resemblance to any known script, suggesting they were invented from scratch.”
The Rongorongo script includes depictions of both real and imaginary things—such as human figures and body parts, animals, plants, tools, celestial bodies, and more.
Although Rongorongo remains undeciphered, efforts to understand it continue. For example, in February 2024, researchers published results from radiocarbon dating of four wooden tablets inscribed with Rongorongo writings.
One of these tablets was made from a tree that was cut between 1493 and 1509 AD, at least 200 years before foreigners arrived on the island.
Researchers also found that this ancient tablet was made from a type of tree that does not grow on Easter Island—the Podocarpus latifolia, native to the southeastern Pacific.
This raised the question of how this wood traveled halfway across the world to reach the island.
Podocarpus is a valuable wood that had been widely used in Europe since the Middle Ages for shipbuilding. Hence, researchers concluded that this wooden tablet might have been made, for example, from the mast of a European ship.
Possibly, a ship sank and its wood drifted across the world’s oceans for decades or centuries before reaching Rapa Nui’s shore.
At that time, the island’s natives had no knowledge of their bitter fate—that Europeans would later personally come to the island, find their wood, and ultimately destroy their writing system and culture forever.
