Rapa Nui Was One of Five Civilizations to Invent Writing. We Used to Be Able to Read It.

Everyone knows about the moai. The writing, it turns out, is a different problem entirely.

A wooden tablet from Rapa Nui, inscribed with mysterious glyphs, was likely created before European contact, suggesting the script is one of history's rare independently invented writing systems. The script is called rongorongo, which means "to recite, to declaim, to chant out" in Rapa Nui. Humanity has invented writing from scratch five known times in recorded history. Rapa Nui may be the sixth.

Researchers radiocarbon dated small samples from four rongorongo tablets held by a group of Catholic nuns in Rome. Three of the tablets came from trees cut down in the 18th or 19th centuries. The fourth came from a tree cut down in the 15th century, well before Europeans set foot on Easter Island in the 1720s.

The tablets' long stay in Rome is its own footnote. In 1863, Peruvian enslavers raided the island; some estimates put the surviving indigenous population at around 200. The following year, a missionary named Eugene Eyraud found evidence of a written language, intricately inscribed on wooden tablets. Four were sent to Rome, where they sat largely unexamined for a century and a half.

Lead author Silvia Ferrara, a philologist at the University of Bologna, argues the research supports an independent invention: rongorongo glyphs bear no resemblance to European letters, and as Ferrara puts it, "Historically speaking, if you borrow a writing system, then you keep it as close to the original as possible." More than 400 distinct glyphs have been identified among roughly 15,000 characters on surviving artifacts. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made. None have succeeded, though researchers have identified what may be calendrical and genealogical information.

Ferrara acknowledges the fourth tablet could have been carved on old wood, cut long before anyone inscribed it. A single tablet is not a conclusion. But it is an argument.

The script may be the only indigenous writing system ever developed in Oceania. It's still unread. The archive, apparently, is open.

Read the full story at Popular Mechanics, May 2025

Hot Take: Rongorongo wasn't lost. The people who could read it were taken. There's a difference, and it matters which one we say.