Text K of the rongorongo

Rongorongo

Rongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, not even...

corpus, also known as the (Small) London tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts, and nearly duplicates the recto of tablet G

Rongorongo text G

Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

.

Other names

K is the standard designation, from Barthel

Thomas Barthel

Thomas Sylvester Barthel was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island....

 (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR19.

Location

British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

, London. Catalog # AOA 1903-150.

There are reproductions in the British Museum; Musée de l'Homme

Musée de l'Homme

The Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878...

, Paris; and the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago.

Physical description

A small tablet, not fluted, of Pacific rosewood (Orliac 2005), 22 × 6.8 × 1.8 cm. One end is chipped off, but no glyphs are missing. However, there appears to have been reworking, with the glyphs of line r5 planed off and the adjacent line v1 cut into the planed edge. Fischer also notes underlying hair-line glyphs which suggest to him that K may be a palimpsest

Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος originally compounded from πάλιν and ψάω literally meaning “scraped...

. The later, deeper cuts may have been made with a steel blade. These glyphs are rather crude, of about the quality of side b of Echancrée.

The tablet appears to be worn and polished from handling; however, as it appears from rot and worm holes to have lain for a time in wet soil (perhaps a cave), the polish must be due to subsequent handling, perhaps with its European owners.

Provenance

Although its provenance is not well documented, and therefore suspect, Fischer believes that the London tablet may be the youngest authentic inscription that has survived.

Dalton (1904) writes that he purchased the tablet in an antique store in London's dock district in about the year 1900. It was "said to have been in the family of its recent owner more than thirty years; if the statement is correct, it must have been among the first of its class to reach Europe". It may have been part of one of several lost collections of tablets. Dalton presented it to the British Museum on 25 November 1903.

Métraux

Alfred Metraux

Alfred Métraux was a Swiss anthropologist and human rights leader.-Early life:Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Metraux spent much of his childhood in Argentina where his father was a well known surgeon resident in Mendoza. His mother was a Georgian from Tbilisi...

 thought at first that the London tablet was a forgery, due to the engraving being of the poor quality seen in modern carvings for tourists. However, after he had a chance to see it in person, and after Barthel declared it authentic, his 'skepticism was dispelled' (1957:184). The evidence is principally the paraphrasing rather than copying of text Gr, which would have required literacy in the script to accomplish.

Fischer (1997) agrees with Métraux and Barthel that tablet K is recent. He believes that it was carved "just before the cessation of rongorongo production in the 1860s", in the period of decline that followed the death of ‘ariki

Ali'i

Alii is a word in the Polynesian language denoting chiefly status in ancient Hawaii and the Samoa Islands. A similar word with the same concept is found in other Polynesian societies. In the Cook Islands, an ariki is a high chief and the House of Ariki is a parliamentary house...

 Nga‘ara in circa 1859.

A figure of the recto reproduced in Routledge (1919:Fig. 98) served as a model for copies sold to tourists on Easter Island in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of these are on display in the world's museums as authentic.

Contents

The London tablet contains the text of the first seven lines of the Small Santiago tablet

Rongorongo text G

Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

, although as a paraphrase rather than a direct copy. Because of the frequent repetition of glyph 380.1, which he interpreted as a tangata rongorongo (rongorongo chanter) with a kouhau (staff), Barthel (1958:310) believed K was a catalog of other kohau rongorongo texts. Fischer also believes it to be a list of some kind, and notes that the simplicity of the repeated glyph on this recent tablet, compared to 380.1+3 of G and 380.1+52 of N, suggests a compositional simplification over time. However, the two patterns are mixed on some tablets.

Text

There are five lines of glyphs on the recto, a transitional line (Kv1) along the edge, and four lines (Kv2-5) on the verso proper. The first and last lines (Kr1 and Kv5) are mostly obliterated. There remain 250 glyphs out of an original ~ 290. As text K is a near copy of Gr, the reading order is established.

The prototypical pictograph of a bird, glyph 600, which looks like a frigatebird

Frigatebird

The frigatebirds are a family, Fregatidae, of seabirds. There are five species in the single genus Fregata. They are also sometimes called Man of War birds or Pirate birds. Since they are related to the pelicans, the term "frigate pelican" is also a name applied to them...

 on older rongorongo texts such as G, here has a different head, resembling in Fischer's opinion the sooty tern

Sooty Tern

The Sooty Tern, Onychoprion fuscatus , is a seabird of the tern family . It is a bird of the tropical oceans, breeding on islands throughout the equatorial zone. Colloquially, it is known as the Wideawake Tern or just wideawake...

. Fischer notes that the last Birdman

Tangata manu

The Tangata manu , was the winner of a traditional competition on Rapa Nui . The ritual was an annual competition to collect the first Sooty Tern egg of the season from the islet of Motu Nui, swim back to Rapa Nui and climb the sea cliff of Rano Kau to the clifftop village of Orongo.-Myth:In the...

competitions sought the egg of the sooty tern rather than the traditional frigatebird, which by then had been hunted out.

Barthel

Recto, as traced by Barthel. The lines have been rearranged to reflect English reading order: Kr1 at top, Kr5 at bottom.

Verso, with Kv1 at top, Kv5 at bottom.

Fischer