Text Q of the
rongorongo
Rongorongo (Rapa Nui: ) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that appears to be writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, with none being successful. Although some c ...
corpus, the smaller of two tablets in St. Petersburg and therefore also known as the Small St Petersburg tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and one of three recording the so-called "
Grand Tradition".
Other names
Q is the standard designation, from
Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR17.
Location
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
The Kunstkamera (russian: Кунсткамера) or Kunstkammer (German for "Culture Room" (literally) or "Art Chamber", typically used for a " cabinet of curiosities") is a public museum located on the Universitetskaya Embankment in Saint Pete ...
, St Petersburg. Catalog # 402/13-1.
There are reproductions in the ''
Musée de l'Homme
The Musée de l'Homme (French, "Museum of Mankind" or "Museum of Humanity") is an anthropology museum in Paris, France. It was established in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 '' Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Modern ...
,'' Paris; the ''
Museum für Völkerkunde,'' Berlin; and the
American Museum of Natural History, New York.
Description
A fluted tablet in poor condition, 44 × 9 × 2.3 cm, made out of a crooked piece of
Pacific rosewood (Orliac 2005). One end has been cut off. There is clay smeared on parts of the tablets which obscures some sequences. The left end of recto line 6 has been gouged out, and a segment has been cut out of line 1 along the bottom edge. The verso has been burnt in spots, the center has been eroded off, and Fischer reports that a large area has been lost since Barthel transcribed it in the 1950s.
Provenance
The Small St Petersburg tablet was obtained by Russian anthropologist
Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai
Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay (russian: Никола́й Никола́евич Миклу́хо-Макла́й; 1846 – 1888) was a Russian Imperial explorer. He worked as an ethnologist, anthropologist and biologist who became famous as one ...
in July 1871 on Tahiti while on board the ''
Vityaz.'' He may have bought it from one of the indentured Rapanui at the Brander plantation. On 30 December 1888, the day before his death, both tablets to the
Russian Geographical Society
The Russian Geographical Society (russian: Ру́сское географи́ческое о́бщество «РГО»), or RGO, is a learned society based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It promotes geography, exploration and nature protection wi ...
of St Petersburg, which permanently lent them to the museum in 1891.
Orliac (2005)
carbon dated
Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
The method was dev ...
the wood to sometime after 1680 CE, though we cannot be sure the text dates from that period.
Contents
Barthel (1958) called tablets
H,
P, and Q the "Grand Tradition" because of their extensive shared sequences. Since many of these appear on the same lines, Fischer believes one served in part, directly or indirectly, as the model for the others, and that they may have had a common geographic origin.
Text
Nine lines on each side display ~ 900 glyphs, out of an original total of ~ 1,100. Fischer reports that some glyphs have been "corrected". The reading order of the parallel texts H, P, and Q is well established.
;Barthel
;Fischer
Image gallery
Image:Rongorongo Q-v Small St Petersburg.jpg, Verso
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. 2005. "The Rongorongo Tablets from Easter Island: Botanical Identification and
14C Dating." ''Archaeology in Oceania'' 40.3.
External links
Barthel's coding of text Q
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rongorongo Text Q
Rongorongo inscriptions