Rongorongo (;
Rapa Nui: ) is a system of
glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s discovered in the 19th century on
Easter Island that appears to be
writing or
proto-writing. Text E of the
rongorongo corpus, also known as ''Keiti'', is one of two dozen known rongorongo texts, though it survives only in photographs and rubbings.
Other names
E is the standard designation, from
Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR6.
Jaussen called it also ''vermoulue'' 'wormeaten'.
Location
Formerly in the library of the
Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. Pinart published rubbings, which are kept in the
Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...
of the
University of California, Berkeley.
Fischer (1997) says that the tablet survives in replicas made from casts. However, these replicas appear to have been of the
Small Santiago; other than the rubbings, ''Keiti'' only survives in the two sets of photographs, one with white fill in the glyphs to make them more visible (Horley 2010).
Description
Destroyed during shelling of
Leuven
Leuven (, ) or Louvain (, , ; german: link=no, Löwen ) is the capital and largest city of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located about east of Brussels. The municipality itself comprises the historic ...
in 1914. Originally a fluted tablet of unknown wood, 39 × 13 cm, in beautiful condition but for some small wormholes esp. on recto, upper right side.
Provenance
One of
Jaussen's tablets, ''Keiti'' was apparently collected on
Easter Island by Fathers
Roussel and Zumbohm in 1870 and sent to him in Tahiti. In 1888 Jaussen sent it to the headquarters of the ''
Congrégation des Sacrés-Coeurs et de l'Adoration'' (SSCC) in Paris, with instructions to forward it to
Charles-Joseph de Harlez de Deulin
Charles-Joseph de Harlez de Deulin ( Liège, 21 August 1832 – Leuven, 14 July 1899) was a Belgian Orientalist, domestic prelate, canon of the cathedral of Liège, and member of the ''Academie Royale'' of Belgium, who studied and translated the ...
at the Catholic University at Louvain. It was sent in 1894, and stored in the university library, which was burnt down by the Germans in the siege of Louvain in 1914.
Content
This is one of the texts Metoro Taua Ure 'read' for Jaussen. However, he read the verso upside down, included the end of line 1 as part of line 2 and read it backwards, from right to left.
Text
Nine lines of glyphs recto, eight verso, for ~ 880 glyphs in all. Pozdniakov found a sequence of glyphs known from several other tablets that is split between lines Er9 and Ev1, confirming Barthel's reading order.
Line 3 of the recto terminates prematurely, with its end wedged between lines 2 and 4, as seen also on the verso of ''
Aruku.''
;Barthel
;Fischer
Image gallery
Image:Rongorongo E-r Keiti raw.jpg, Recto (copy of original print)
Image:Rongorongo_E-r_Keiti.jpg, Recto with white fill
Image:Rongorongo E-v Keiti raw.jpg, Verso (copy of original print)
Image:Rongorongo_E-v_Keiti.jpg, Verso with white fill
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.
* HORLEY, Paul. 2010. "Rongorongo tablet Keiti". ''Rapa Nui Journal'' 24.1:45–5
* POZDNIAKOV, Konstantin. 1996. "Les Bases du Déchiffrement de l'Écriture de l'Ile de Pâques (The Bases of Deciphering the Writing of Easter Island)". ''
Journal de la Société des Océanistes'' 103 (2): 289–303.
* POZDNIAKOV, Konstantin. 2011. "Tablet ''Keiti'' and calendar-like structures in Rapanui script". (preprin
External links
Barthel's coding of text EDiscovery of a copy of the photographs
{{Rongorongo
Rongorongo inscriptions