Easter Island's Script Was Written Like a Snake Coiling

Eugène Eyraud, a French missionary, landed on Rapa Nui on January 2, 1864 and wrote home that nearly every hut held a wooden tablet covered in tiny carved figures — humans, fish, birds, abstract glyphs. None of the islanders he asked could read them. Five years later, missionaries sent four of the tablets off the island. None remain on Rapa Nui today.

The surviving corpus is around 25 objects with roughly 15,000 glyphs and at least 400 distinct signs. The lines run in reverse boustrophedon: left-to-right along one row, then the reader rotates the tablet 180 degrees to read the next row, again left-to-right but now upside-down relative to the first. The carvings were made with shark teeth and obsidian flakes on toromiro and Pacific rosewood.

For a long time the obvious assumption was that rongorongo had been picked up from European writing after Spanish ships visited in 1770. A 2024 radiocarbon study at Nature pushed back: one of the Berlin tablets was made from wood cut between 1493 and 1509 — two centuries before any documented European contact. If the script was invented locally, it would be one of only a handful of independent inventions of writing in human history.

Decipherment has not budged. Calendrical sequences and what may be a genealogical list have been sketched out, but nobody can read a sentence. The last Rapa Nui who could chant the tablets aloud died before any of them were transcribed.