Rongorongo text S

Text S of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Great or Large Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

S is the standard designation, from Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR16.

Location

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Catalog # [http://acsmith.si.edu/emuwebanthweb/pages/nmnh/anth/Display.php?irn=8010185&QueryPage=%2Femuwebanthweb%2Fpages%2Fnmnh%2Fanth%2FQuery.php A129774] . Not accessible to researchers.

There is a reproduction in the "Musée de l'Homme," Paris.

Physical description

S is a long bevelled but not fluted driftwood board of "Podocarpus latifolius" wood (Orliac 2007), 63 × 12 × 1.6 cm, that curves to a point at one end. It was cut into a plank for a canoe (Fischer believes line Sb1 was planed for this purpose), and twelve holes were bored along the perimeter for lashings. [Perhaps to repair a canoe. James Cook noticed "des fines sculptures" in otherwise poorly built canoes.Fact|date=March 2008 ] Both sides were heavily damaged by fire for "a great loss of text".

Provenance

In December 1886, Thomson bought both Washington tablets on Easter Island with the mediation of his Tahitian aide Alexander Salmon "after a great deal of trouble and at considerable expense". He gave both to the Smithsonian on 30 April 1890.

Fischer (1997) states that this and "Mamari" are "the only authentic rongorongo artefacts whose premissionary owners are known by name." Thomson was told that "The large one [S] is a piece of drift-wood, that from its peculiar shape is supposed to have been used as a portion of a canoe". Thirty years later, Routledge was told the same::"The natives told us that an expert living on the south coast, whose house had been full of such glyphs, abandoned them at the call of the missionaries, on which a man named Niari, being of a practical mind, got hold of the discarded tablets and made a boat of them wherein he caught much fish. When the "sewing came out," he stowed the wood into a cave at an ahu near Hanga Roa, to be made later into a new vessel there. Pakarati, an islander now living, found a piece, and it was acquired by the U.S.A. ship "Mohican. (Routledge, 1919:207)

Fischer (1997) reports that in her field notes, Routledge documented that the tablets had belonged to Puhi ‘a Rona, a "tuhunga tâ" (scribe) of Hanga Hahave, whose house "was full of tablets and [he] scindered them at the call of the missionaries". (This may explain the fire damage.) It was Nicolás Pakarati who sold it to Thomson.

Although the missionaries have been blamed for the burning of the tablets, in the manner of the Mayan codices, there is no hint of this in their own writings, and the few missionaries who were active on Easter Island at the time either ignored the tablets (Eyraud) or attempted to collect them (Roussel). If tablets were burned after conversion to Christianity, it may have been part of a more general pattern of abandoning the old religion.

Content

Fischer (1997) identifies a list of short sequences, each beginning with the glyph 380.1, as a pattern shared between the Large Washington (lines 3-4 and 6 on side a) and several other tablets.

Text

There are eight lines of glyphs on side a and nine on side b, with ~ 730 recognizable glyphs out of an original 1,200 or so.

;Barthel

;Fischer

Image gallery

Notes

External links

* [http://www.rongorongo.org/translit/s.html Barthel's coding of text S]

References

* BARTHEL, Thomas S. 1958. "Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift" (Bases for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script). Hamburg : Cram, de Gruyter.
* FISCHER, Steven Roger. 1997. "RongoRongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Texts." Oxford and N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
* ORLIAC, Catherine. 2007. "Botanical Identification of the Wood of the Large "Kohau Rongorongo" tablet of St. Petersburg." "Rapa Nui Journal" 21(1):7-10.
* ROUTLEDGE, Katherine. 1919. "The Mystery of Easter Island: The story of an expedition." London and Aylesbury: Hazell, Watson and Viney, LD.
* THOMSON, William J. 1891. "Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island". "Report of the United States National Museum for the Year Ending June 30, 1889." Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution for 1889. 447-552. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. (An online version is available [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/ei/index.htm www.sacred-texts.com/pac/ei here] )