Easter Island is famous for its towering stone Moai statues, but there’s another mystery on this remote Pacific island that may be even more baffling. Carved into wooden tablets, a strange script known as Rongorongo has defied every attempt at translation for more than 150 years. And new scientific research suggests this enigmatic writing system may represent something extraordinarily rare in human history.
Rapa Nui, as the island is known to its indigenous people, sits roughly 3,700 kilometers off the coast of Chile. It is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. The Polynesian settlers who arrived around the 13th century built a remarkable civilization in near-total isolation. They carved the famous Moai. They developed complex rituals and social structures. And they may have independently invented a writing system found nowhere else in the Pacific.
That system is Rongorongo.
A Missionary’s Strange Discovery
The first outsider to document the script was Eugène Eyraud, a French Catholic missionary who arrived on Easter Island on January 2, 1864. In nearly every hut he visited, Eyraud found something unexpected: wooden tablets and sticks covered in rows of intricate symbols.
He described finding “wooden tablets or sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters” depicting animals unknown on the island, carved with sharp stones. He noted that despite their presence in almost every home, the islanders seemed to pay them little attention. Eyraud believed the characters were “remnants of some primitive writing” that the people maintained out of habit “without seeking its meaning.”
It was a devastating observation. By 1864, the knowledge of how to read Rongorongo may have already been lost.
The reason was catastrophic. Between 1862 and 1863, Peruvian slave raiders had kidnapped roughly 1,500 islanders, including the island’s paramount chief, his heir, and critically, the tangata rongorongo, the trained scribes who were the only people able to read and write the script. When a handful of survivors were eventually returned, they brought smallpox with them. The resulting epidemic reduced the population to barely a couple hundred people. An entire civilization’s literary tradition was wiped out in just a few years.
What Rongorongo Looks Like
The Rongorongo glyphs are unlike anything else found in Polynesia. They depict stylized humans, birds, fish, plants, and geometric shapes, approximately one centimeter tall, carved into lines running across wooden surfaces. Roughly 120 basic symbols have been identified, with hundreds of additional variations and combinations bringing the total glyph count to around 600.
The script is written in a pattern called reverse boustrophedon. A reader starts at the bottom left of a tablet and reads to the right. At the end of the line, the tablet is rotated 180 degrees, and the next line is read. This means every other line appears upside-down relative to its neighbor. It’s a writing method rarely seen anywhere else in the world.
According to oral tradition, the symbols were carved using obsidian flakes or small shark teeth. Tradition also holds that scribes practiced on banana leaves before committing their work to the more precious wood. German ethnologist Thomas Barthel even experimented with this theory and found that glyphs carved into banana leaves were quite visible due to the sap that dried on the surface of the cuts.
Today, fewer than 30 Rongorongo objects survive. They are scattered across museums and private collections worldwide. Not a single one remains on Easter Island. Most are tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, but the collection also includes a chieftain’s staff, a bird-man statuette, and two crescent-shaped chest ornaments called reimiro. Only about half are in good condition and considered authentic beyond question.
Why No One Can Read It
The story of Rongorongo’s near-decipherment is almost as fascinating as the script itself.
In 1868, the Bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Étienne Jaussen, received a remarkable gift from Catholic converts on Easter Island: a long cord of braided human hair wound around a small wooden board covered in glyphs. Stunned by the discovery, Jaussen immediately wrote to missionaries on the island to collect every tablet they could find and locate anyone who could translate them.
The search was largely in vain. Only a few more tablets were recovered. And the islanders could not agree on how to read them.
However, in Tahiti, Jaussen found a laborer from Easter Island named Metoro Tau’a Ure who was said to know the inscriptions. Between 1869 and 1874, Jaussen worked with Metoro to interpret four tablets. But the results were puzzling. Metoro appeared to chant descriptions of the glyphs rather than actually reading them, and his interpretations did not hold up to later scrutiny. The collaboration produced a list of glyph identifications that scholars have debated ever since.
The obstacles to cracking Rongorongo are formidable. There are only about 15,000 legible glyphs across the surviving texts, a tiny corpus compared to other undeciphered scripts. There is no bilingual “Rosetta Stone” to provide a translation key. And the old Rapanui language that the tablets likely represent has been heavily mixed with Tahitian over the centuries, making linguistic comparison extremely difficult.
There’s also a fundamental question that scholars still debate: is Rongorongo actually writing at all?
Some researchers argue it’s a true writing system, a script that encodes specific language with phonetic or logographic values. Others believe it’s proto-writing, a system of symbols that conveys information without directly representing spoken language, more like a sophisticated memory aid than a readable text. According to one linguistic reference, Rongorongo “was probably used as a memory aid or for decorative purposes, not for recording the Rapanui language of the islanders.”
The one partial breakthrough involves Tablet C, known as the Mamari tablet. Most scholars agree that a section of this tablet contains a lunar calendar listing the nights of the traditional Rapanui month. It’s the closest thing researchers have to a readable passage, but even this sequence cannot be fully translated.
New Evidence: Older Than We Thought
For decades, one of the biggest questions about Rongorongo has been when it was created. Some scholars theorized that the script was inspired by European writing, perhaps after a 1770 Spanish visit during which Rapa Nui chiefs were asked to sign a treaty of annexation. If the islanders saw European writing for the first time and were inspired to create their own, Rongorongo could be a case of what anthropologists call transcultural diffusion rather than independent invention.
But a groundbreaking 2024 study published in Scientific Reports may have changed the equation. A team led by philologist Silvia Ferrara of the University of Bologna radiocarbon-dated four Rongorongo tablets preserved in Rome. Three of the tablets yielded 18th or 19th century dates. But one tablet produced a secure date from the mid-15th century, well before any European had set foot on Easter Island.
The researchers noted that the 15th-century tablet appeared to be made from driftwood, from a tree species not native to Rapa Nui. While there’s a slim possibility the wood was old when it was inscribed, Ferrara considered this unlikely, as it would mean the wood had been stored for over 200 years before being used.
Ferrara told reporters that the distinctiveness of the glyphs, which bear no resemblance to European letters, further supports independent invention. She noted that historically, when a culture borrows a writing system from another, they tend to keep it close to the original.
If Rongorongo truly predates European contact, it could represent one of only a handful of times in all of human history that writing was independently invented, joining the ranks of Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese script, and Mesoamerican writing systems.
Chemist Rafal Wieczorek of the University of Warsaw, who has studied Rongorongo tablets independently, told Smithsonian Magazine that he believes Rongorongo is one of these rare independent inventions, “but belief is a different thing than hard data,” adding that ideally researchers would test all the surviving tablets.
What Could the Tablets Say?
Without a successful decipherment, the content of the Rongorongo tablets remains a matter of speculation. Various researchers have proposed that the texts record genealogies, astronomical observations, agricultural records, navigation instructions, or religious chants. Oral history suggests the tablets were considered sacred and that only a small elite class of priests and chiefs were ever trained to read them.
A 2025 study by researcher Erik Kiley claimed to have achieved a complete phonetic decipherment of all 26 known Rongorongo inscriptions, arguing the script is a syllabic writing system encoding Polynesian mythology, navigational records, and ritual knowledge. However, this work has not yet been widely accepted by the academic community and remains under peer review. History is littered with claimed Rongorongo decipherments, at least twenty by some counts, and none have gained consensus among specialists.
The mystery endures. Those neatly carved rows of birds and humans and strange geometric shapes clearly meant something to the people who created them. Whether they represent a full writing system or an elaborate mnemonic device, they are evidence of a sophisticated intellectual tradition that flourished in one of the most remote places on the planet.
For now, the tablets remain silent, their message locked away in symbols that have outlived every person who could read them.
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