After seven years of work, a New Zealand linguist has deciphered a strange script found on mysterious Easter Island showing the inhabitants were the first in Oceania to write.
Steven Fischer said the script, known as rongorongo, is made up of chants in the Rapanui language, Easter Island's Polynesian tongue, and tell the story of creation.It was the Spanish who inspired the Rapanui to write when they arrived in this island 2,200 miles west of Chile in the late 1700's, Fischer said. The island, known for its mysterious hieroglyphics and monolithic stone heads of unknown origin, was discovered on Easter Day, 1722.
"The visit of the Spaniards in 1770 - that's where the idea of writing came from," Fischer said.
"However, the creation, the function, the morphology of the rongorongo script is entirely a Polynesian creation coming from the Easter Islanders, the Rapanui, themselves."
Fischer said the Rapanui practiced rongorongo for only about three generations from the 1780s until 1865. The rongorongo was written by pre-missionary priests who would inscribe wooden artifacts and read from them in the form of various chants.
But less than 100 years later, the language of creation had become a tale of destruction as slave traders and Western diseases nearly wiped out the local population.
South American slave traders carried off shiploads of Easter Islanders to work in the households of Peru, many of them later dying from smallpox.
Easter Island's inhabitants, estimated at around 4,000 in 1722, fell to just over 100 by 1887.
"That caused the remnant civilization of Rapanui to crash. The practice of rongorongo stopped overnight," Fischer said.