Rongorongo (/ˈrɒŋɡoʊˈrɒŋɡoʊ/[1] or /ˈrɒŋoʊˈrɒŋoʊ/;[2] Rapa Nui: roŋoroŋo [ˈɾoŋoˈɾoŋo]) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that has the appearance of writing or proto-writing.

The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a tangata manu statuette, and two reimiro ornaments.

This 15-meter (50 ft) tree, known as "Pacific rosewood" for its color and called makoꞌi in Rapanui, is used for sacred groves and carvings throughout eastern Polynesia and was evidently brought to Easter Island by the first settlers.

[12] The fact that the islanders were reduced to inscribing driftwood, and were regardless extremely economical in their use of wood, may have had consequences for the structure of the script, such as the abundance of ligatures and potentially a telegraphic style of writing that would complicate textual analysis.

During the early missionary period that began in 1864, it was reported that women wore bark cloth decorated with "symbols"; a fragment of one of these survives, and appears to be rongorongo.

[14] Oral tradition holds that, because of the great value of wood, only expert scribes used it, while pupils wrote on banana leaves.

German ethnologist Thomas Barthel believed that carving on wood was a secondary development in the evolution of the script based on an earlier stage of incising banana leaves or the sheaths of the banana trunk with a bone stylus, and that the medium of leaves was retained not only for lessons but to plan and compose the texts of the wooden tablets.

According to oral tradition, scribes used obsidian flakes or small shark teeth, presumably the hafted tools still used to carve wood in Polynesia, to flute and polish the tablets and then to incise the glyphs.

[note 2] Vertical strings of chevrons or lozenges, for example, are typically connected with hair-line cuts, as can be seen repeatedly in the closeup of one end of tablet B below.

However, Barthel was told that the last literate Rapanui king, Ngaꞌara, sketched out the glyphs in soot applied with a fish bone and then engraved them with a shark tooth.

Oral tradition holds that either Hotu Matuꞌa or Tuꞌu ko Iho, the legendary founder(s) of Rapa Nui, brought 67 tablets from their homeland.

Indeed, early visitors were told that literacy was a privilege of the ruling families and priests who were all kidnapped in the Peruvian slaving raids or died soon afterward in the resulting epidemics.

That the script was not otherwise observed by early explorers, who spent little time on the island, may reflect that it was taboo; such taboos may have lost power along with the tangata rongorongo (scribes) by the time Rapa Nui society collapsed following Peruvian slaving raids and the resulting epidemics, so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day.

Designs include a concentration of chimeric bird-man figures at Orongo, a ceremonial center of the tangata manu ("bird-man") cult; faces of the creation deity Makemake; marine animals like turtles, tuna, swordfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, crabs, and octopuses (some with human faces); roosters; canoes, and over 500 komari (vulvas).

Several of the anthropomorphic and animal-form petroglyphs have parallels in rongorongo, for instance a double-headed frigatebird (glyph 680) on a fallen moꞌai topknot, a figure which also appears on a dozen tablets.

But the sequence does not appear to have been carved in a single hand (see image at right), and the cave is near the house that produced the Poike tablet, a crude imitation of rongorongo, so the Ana o Keke petroglyphs may not be authentic.

Eugène Eyraud, a lay friar of the Congrégation de Picpus, landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from Valparaíso.

Each figure has its own name; but the scant attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now for them a habitual practice which they keep without seeking its meaning.

It was a long cord of human hair, a fishing line perhaps, wound around a small wooden board covered in hieroglyphic writing.

Stunned at the discovery, he wrote to Father Hippolyte Roussel on Easter Island to collect all the tablets and to find natives capable of translating them.

He said that there was nobody left on the island who knew how to read the characters since the Peruvians had brought about the deaths of all the wise men and, thus, the pieces of wood were no longer of any interest to the natives who burned them as firewood or wound their fishing lines around them!

[49] British archaeologist and anthropologist Katherine Routledge undertook a 1914–1915 scientific expedition to Rapa Nui with her husband to catalog the art, customs, and writing of the island.

The texts themselves she believed to be litanies for priest-scribes, kept apart in special houses and strictly tapu, that recorded the island's history and mythology.

The objects are mostly oblong wooden tablets, with the exceptions of I, a possibly sacred chieftain's staff known as the Santiago Staff; J and L, inscribed on reimiro pectoral ornaments worn by the elite; X, inscribed on various parts of a tangata manu statuette; and Y, a European snuff box assembled from sections cut from a rongorongo tablet.

The tablets, like the pectorals, statuettes, and staves, were works of art and valued possessions, and were apparently given individual proper names in the same manner as jade ornaments in New Zealand.

Crude glyphs have been found on a few stone objects and some additional wooden items, but most of these are thought to be fakes created for the early tourism market.

Several of the 26 wooden texts are suspect due to uncertain provenance (X, Y, and Z), poor quality craftsmanship (F, K, V, W, Y, and Z), or to having been carved with a steel blade (K, V, and Y),[note 3] and thus, although they may prove to be genuine, should not be trusted in initial attempts at decipherment.

There are other designs, including some tattoos recorded by early visitors, which are possibly single rongorongo glyphs, but since they are isolated and pictographic, it is difficult to know whether or not they are actually writing.

In the case of allography, the bare numeric code was assigned to what Barthel believed to be the basic form (Grundtypus), while variants were specified by alphabetic suffixes.

[62] The prevailing opinion is that rongorongo is not true writing but proto-writing, or even a more limited mnemonic device for genealogy, choreography, navigation, astronomy, or agriculture.