The Easter Island Script You Read by Flipping the Tablet

Twenty-six wooden tablets are all that survive of rongorongo, the script of Rapa Nui — the only writing system known to have been invented in Oceania before the twentieth century. The French missionary Eugène Eyraud reported them in 1864. By the 1870s most had been burnt, buried, or shipped to museums.

The glyphs are little hooked figures of birds, fish, plants, and humans, packed in dense rows. The reading direction is the strange part. You begin at the bottom-left corner. You read right along the line. Then you rotate the tablet 180 degrees and continue. Linguists call this reverse boustrophedon; every other line is upside down relative to its neighbors, and the only way to read continuously is to keep turning the wood in your hands.

This is also why rongorongo has stayed unread. Every successful decipherment has used at least one of three crutches: a bilingual inscription, a closely related cracked script, or a living reading tradition. Rongorongo offers none. Thomas Barthel identified a calendrical sequence on Tablet C in 1958 — glyphs that line up with lunar nights — and that remains the most reliable thing anyone has gotten out of the script. Steven Roger Fischer announced a full reading in the 1990s; Jacques Guy and Igor Pozdniakov showed his patterns fell out of the script's structure, not any specific text.

The long-running open question was whether the script existed before European contact in 1770. In February 2024, a team led by Silvia Ferrara at Bologna radiocarbon-dated four tablets in Rome and found one dated to 1493-1509. The wood was growing nearly three centuries before any European set foot on the island.

The writing on it could be later. But for the first time the timeline allows what the islanders themselves always claimed: that they came up with it on their own.