The Other Mystery of Easter Island

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Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island's lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity.

Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island's history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script's mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhat isolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limited natural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over the following years the island's population of four thousand or so was slowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slave traders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitants remained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strange language was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, and forbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced the inhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions

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Rongorongo tablets

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Well this is super cool in my books. I had no idea about this so there is bound to be more informed then me on this subject, but, I thought I would bring it to the attention to people that have never heard of this before.

So they THINK that the spanish brought writing there, but yet it doesn't resemble the spanish writing at all. Sounds like a good old fashioned mystery to me.

I always find the fact that we cannot translate old languages very interesting because they could be telling us what we need to know. Like the vimanas they could be describing something we take as modern technology. It could prove once translated more mysterious than it does now.

Anyways thought I would spread the knowledge about this big wonder of Easter Island because most people know about the first mystery, and the second one, to me anyways, is just as interesting.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

Those are amazing I didn't know that about Easter Island, thank you for sharing and doing the research.

I remember a website about Atlantis, ancient Sumatra, Egypt & other ancient cultures having strangely similar languages. I think Easter Island was mentioned, with those SYMBOLS being similar too.. Native American sacred designs are also found around the world, ( the hoop/ the 4 winds, etc.)
Sorry I can't remember what the website was..

Shop early, shop often... Caveat Emptor.

Yes RongoRongo is extremely revealing as to it's ancient origins in India.

I wrote a thread a really long time ago where I presented a ton of information about RongoRongo and various other aspects of why Easter Island was connected by boat with South America and Asia.

Rather than crossing the Bering Straight, there is ample evidence including DNA evidence, that proves there was a travel route through the Southern Pacific Islands.

Here is my old thread Native America : The First Melting Pot.

You should give it a read, I personally believe I laid out my case very well and without a shadow of a doubt, there was a global travel network in existence thousands of years prior to our current understanding.

I also paid some attention to how Japanese fishermen would randomly get displaced on the West coast of North America, how the Africans were in Eastern South America, etc.

I always considered the Easter Island evidence as some of the best and most startling of all.

Not only do the Easter Islanders have RongoRongo which is exactly the same as Indus Valley Script.
Compare the two languages - Chart

The Totora Reed and the Tavari are both plants that grow on Easter Island, but they originally came from Lake Titicaca in South America. Right next door to Teohuinaco.

Masonry on Easter Island bears striking resemblance to the custom cut stones used throughout South America.

But where did Easter Islanders come from? In my thread I listed this legend which explains in detail exactly where they came from.

"King Hotu-Matua's country was called Maori, and it was on the continent of Hiva...The king saw that the land was slowly sinking in the sea", as a result he put all his people into two giant canoes and sailed East to Easter Island."

So there is a chance they migrated from New Zealand, around that area.

But when we look at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that was just a small jump in the large travels this group has been through over the last several thousand years.

India ---> South Pacific ---> South America

If anything just look at the chart really closely.
The Link you Must not Ignore!


How it compares Indus Valley Script with RongoRongo.
Tell me they aren't the exact same language?

This one piece of evidence alone should force us to rewrite our history books. But we haven't, why? Don't history book publishers love printing new editions so they can justify selling a million new copies?

reply to post by muzzleflash


What would the tablet say if someone did use the Indus valley translation of it?

They bare remarkable similarities.

Originally posted by Conclusion1
reply to post by muzzleflash

 

What would the tablet say if someone did use the Indus valley translation of it?

They bare remarkable similarities.

There is a bit of a problem there.

I don't really know if anyone has 100% cracked the Indus Valley script yet. It's quite old and mysterious.

Here I will share some info.
Indus Valley Code is Cracked, Maybe

This was from 2009 I believe.

MUMBAI - A 4,500-year-old mystery has been revived, with Indian- American scientists claiming on April 23 that the puzzling symbols that were found on Indus Valley seals are indeed the written script of a language from an ancient civilization.

Interesting possibilities and over a period of time they do start appearing rather inevitable.
However there is always controversy...

But skeptics, such as historian Steve Farmer and Harvard University Indologist Michael Witzel, say that claims of the Indus Valley civilization having a written language, and therefore a literate culture, are generally created by pseudo-nationalists from India, Hindu chauvinists and right-wing political frauds who wish to glorify the existence of an ancient Hindu civilization.

Ok so there is a bit of nationalist pride going on there. Same as everywhere else imho.
But are the claims at least partially true? Perhaps.
Attacking a theory as chauvinist is a poor attempt at skepticism and debunking, as it doesn't actually approach the claim itself (ancient unknown Indian Civilizations) but instead attacks the messenger of the claim based on personal eccentricity. Failed attempt at debunking...pity.

The civilization on the banks of the 2,900-kilometer long Indus, one of the world's great rivers with a water volume twice that of the Nile, is said to have flourished between 2600 BC to 1900 BC. Unlike its river valley contemporaries in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, very little is known about the Indus Valley civilization, largely because its "script" is yet to be deciphered, even though ruins were excavated 130 years ago.

I would suggest that the civilization is OLDER than previously believed. A good hint that we are wrong is because we actually don't know much about them at all. And we are still struggling with cracking the translations and may or may not have advanced in our decryption efforts.

On April 23, the US-based Science journal published a paper by an Indian and Indian-American team of scientists and researchers that claimed patterns of symbols found on Indus objects had the definitive linguistic pattern found in written languages. Such a pattern is different from non-linguistic signs. The paper, titled "'Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script”, featured the findings of Indian-born researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai [1].

So maybe we have a few new leads? Hope so.
There is just so much about the history of that civilization we need to find out about. It sucks that we humans have a collective memory problem and forget about our past so easily.

For further reading and information with more sources and links check out this Wiki article on Indus Script

To me this is really what ATS is all about. What is a real mystery? I'd have to say RongoRongo is. And it's implications are so profound and far reaching that no matter what it turns out to be, no matter how mundane, it will change our entire historical perspective and fill in some huge blanks about our past.

Here we have these two totally mysterious and unknown ancient languages, Indus Script and RongoRongo, which look like mirror images of each other nearly; and are yet separated by thousands of miles of oceans and islands.

Everywhere you look, there is connections to be made on explaining the obvious here. On the thread I liked above I go into some research and found a few links (some may no longer work) where the statuary of many random dispersed Pacific Islander tribes and South American statuary were highly identical as well.

And everyone knows that the Pacific Islanders got to their respective islands by boating in the first place. No one argued they didn't.

The problem was that mainstream anthropology took Favor with the Bering Straight theory and ran with it as if it was 100% fact and the only possible explanation for natives living in the Americas. It's absurd. Sure maybe some came that way, but not all...there is far too much DNA evidence of genetic variations throughout the Americas to have only one port of entry. There were many ports of entry.

Easter Island is the mid-point between South America and Oceania. It must have been an ancient port of some type. Combine that with the evidence around Teohuinaco of docks and ancient ports. Plus the fact we have Laka Titicaca vegetation somehow popping up in the diets of Easter Islanders prior to Western intervention.

I'll comment on just a small piece of your message

It must have been an ancient port of some type. Combine that with the evidence around Teohuinaco of docks and ancient ports.

Sorry no Easter Island has no 'port' there is one beach in the north where boats can/could beach. The docks you speak of are on a river that leads into the lake, they are not a sea port

It's absurd. Sure maybe some came that way, but not all...there is far too much DNA evidence of genetic variations throughout the Americas to have only one port of entry.

Such as? The present theory and the genetic data shows an Asian basis for the peopling of America, by way of Beringia and down the west coast from Asia. Although possible no evidence for genetic inclusions from the Polynesian (who also came from Asia), Africa or Europe have not been detected as of yet.

Have you read John Relethford’s 'Reflections of Our Past'?

reply to post by muzzleflash


Man that was an excellent answer.

You should be a teacher or professor. I think I am going to check out your threads. Thanks for the links.

Conc,

i foudn this genetic migration map based on mitochondrial DNA very useful

www.bradshawfoundation.com...

reply to post by predator0187


Both mayan and pacific island writing and cultural symbols are very related to Indus ones. It's safe to say that they're linked.

I recall that the original people of the island, the long-ears, had pale skin and red hair. There was a thread here on ATS about the red-haired race, BTW. Were the people of the Indus valley red-haired? There are ancient hill forts on many of the islands of the Pacific, and I wonder if they were built by such people. In the north Pacific, in particular, the Aleutian islands, there were once a race of pale, red-haired people who used iron, and fought a long, losing battle against the Aleut. The Russians made contact with them when there were few left, and they are all but forgotten today. These fragments of a people indicate the vast are they may once have inhabited.

OK. Frrom a book called Heavens Mirror, By Graham Hancock....
"Recited from the Rongrongo tablet in the nineteenth century by one of the last islanders who could read the script.
He came down from heaven to Earth
To both earths, did Hotu-Matua,
returning with the help of Heaven to both worlds of his eldest son,
to both worlds, to his world.
He came in the ship of his youngest son,
his best son,
came to Earth from Heaven.

Another excerpt.

In the days of Rokoroko He Tau the sky fell,
Fell from above on to the Earth.
The people cried out, 'The sky has fallen in the days of King rokoroko He tau'
He took hold: he waited a given time. The sky returned; it went away and it stayed up there."

Also, the following, recited from a Rongorongo tablet in 1886 by an elder named Ure Vaeiko:

"When the island was first created and became known to our fore fathers, the land was crossed by roads beautifully paved with flat stones. The stones were laid so close together so artistically that no rough edges were exposed. Heke was the builderof these roads, and it was he who sat in the place of honour in the middle where the roads branched away in every direction. These roads were cunningly contrived to represent the plan of the web of the greay and black pointed spider, and no man can discover the beginning and the end thereof."

The recitation broke off at thie point because of 'unintelligble text in another language' that Ure Veiko did not recognize, then he completed it with a second cryptic reference to the pointed spider. Originally, he intoned, this creature had lived in Hiva and 'would have mounted to heaven, but was prevented by the bitterness of the cold.'

Take from it what you will. Very good book by the way. Lots of nice pictures and intriguing ideas!

reply to post by muzzleflash


Thanks for your contributions buddy. It is amazing how close the two languages are, and how far they are apart. Amazing information and all I have been doing is reading about this now.

Pred...

reply to post by predator0187

Muzzleflash certainly does seem to have done the homework with respect to his odd theory of the origins of rongorongo. However, I suspect the chart to which he has twice drawn our attention is spurious, with the Indus and Easter Island glyphs redrawn to make them look more similar than they really are.

First of all, no large collection of Indus Valley glyphs, such as these rongorongo inscriptions [2] has ever been found. They are usually found in groups of about half a dozen, as in these pictures [2] and some scholars do not even accept that they are writing. The longest glyph strings to have been unearthed are shown here.

For comparison, here is a Mesopotamian tablet of roughly the same age, inscribed with a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This, as we all know, is what written language looks like. Nothing remotely like it has been found at any Indus Valley site.

*

If some people of the Indus Valley civilization did in fact migrate to Easter Island and take their language and script with them, they must have done so about two thousand years before Christ, for that was when the Indus civilization collapsed. If they did, then both the language and the script survived almost unchanged on Easter Island for nearly four thousand years. Such adamantine preservation would make them unique among both languages and scripts. Languages are usually good for a few hundred years at most, changing literally from week to week and year to year; scripts can last much longer, but it is rare even for them to do so without radical change. That one could have survived unchanged for so long on a remote tropical island, far from its source and without cultural reinforcement, is very unlikely indeed.

Here's a link to a video by Robert Schoch on the Rongo-Rongo script, given at an Electric Universe conference. Keep in mind that he is a geologist by training, but he makes some interesting connections. What he says is just a tentative beginning, but it might explain a lot.

www.youtube.com...

A fascinating parallel, and I, as not even an amateur linguist, don't have much that I can say about this. But I do have one major objection...

The timeline is WAY off.

The latest claims of Indus Script are 1100 BC; the earliest time that anyone credibly places the settling of Easter Island is 300 AD. Assuming that the most extreme dates are the correct ones, there's still a 1400 year gap. A positive lineage between the two languages would need to be established; other Polynesian societies using any sort of language or symbol system that creates a bridge between the two. Heck, any culture at ALL using something resembling the Indus script in the intervening time would give the theory a lot more weight.

(I did get my information primarily from wikipedia; so while it is b y no means definitive, it does have a general tendency towards rough accuracy.)

reply to post by Solasis


That 300CE date is the date that the hawaiians arrived on Easter island and made permanent settlements, South Americans had been making limited visits for quite some time by then.
One issue I have with the mainstream perception of the settling of Easter island is that it is an exception in all of the polynesian settled islands, is that alone of all of the polynesian settled islands that didn't bring pigs with them and the rat didn't arrive till 900 ce or 1300 ce depending on which school of thought you are. This means that Easter island was settled before "polynesians" aquired the pig from their melanesian neighbors, in far western Polynesia. And if you take a close look at the genetics of the polynesian rat, it is clear that the spread into Polynesia is from east to west, which is counter to the accepted idea of a west to east dispersal.
As far a rongo rongo is concerned, all one has to do is look at the lapita people of melanesia. The dravidian sailors of the indus valley civilization, traded with people in Indonesia, as did the lapita of melanesia. The interesting thing is that the lapita were not melanesians, and they seem to have appeared on the scene with a fully developed culture, there is no pre lapita culture, and contrary to popular belief the lapita were NOT the ancestors to the polynesians, that distinction falls to the Haida G'waii tribe in British Columbia.
In all this is very complicated scenario, with many players over very broad timespans.

Muzzleflash, I haven't read your thread but I will , I have one last thing to add. The Americas weren't the original melting pot, but was the wellspring of many peoples and a meltingpot. There is clear evidence that central and south America were racially very diverse.
I have come to believe that the Americas were the origin for for the proto caucasoids and the evidence is starting to show this. There been a lot a hoopla about "red haired and or giant " mummies being found in NA . Aside from the spirit cave mummies, there are no other instances of giant red haired mummies in north America.
But native California lore speaks of " the cannibal giants" and the lore of the northern Nevada tribes , speak of defeating the red haired cannibals, with the help of other tribes in the area. In fact a legend of one of my local tribes states that a "great chief' called all of the warriors to go north to fight, but their way was blocked by an ice wall. This pins down the time frame as there was only a very brief period of glaciation that would account for this scenario, which happens to fall in line with the dating of the spirit cave mummies.
I attribute these " red haired" giants with the original Clovis people. Clovis spread throughout the Americas and persisted longer than is currently accepted. Think about it, it is natural selection, if you are hunting large animal for a living, the biggest and strongest survive. These people spread to south and central America, and laid the foundations of future cultures.

reply to post by Lazarus Short


Another Link to this guys main page as he is probably one of the best sources around for logical thought on alot of these ancient cultures and has both a large fan base in traditional as well as alternative history.

www.robertschoch.com...