Text U 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, carved on a beam, also known as Honolulu tablet 2 or Honolulu 3628, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

U 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 RR12.

Location

Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Catalog # B.03623 (misidentified as # B.03628 in some sources).

Physical description

A charred, worm-eaten, and heavily corroded beam, 70.5 × 8 × 2.6 cm of unknown wood. Not fluted. The area of visible inscription on side a (pictured) measures 14 × 5 cm, punctuated with a knothole.

Métraux (1938) said of the Honolulu tablets T and U that,

Probably these tablets were kept for some time in a cave, and the side lying on the ground was greatly injured by the damp soil.

Provenance

Collector J. L. Young of Auckland

Auckland

The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...

 purchased three of the Honolulu tablets circa 1888 "from Rapanui through a reliable agent", who Fischer thinks was probably Alexander Salmon, Jr

Alexander Salmon, Jr

Alexander Ariipaea Vehiaitipare Salmon Jr. was the English-Jewish-Tahitian co-owner of the Maison Brander plantations on Tahiti and de facto ruler of Easter Island from 1878 till its cession to Chile in 1888.-Family:...

. It was transferred to the Bishop Museum in August 1920.

Contents

As with Échancrée

Rongorongo text D

Text D of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Échancrée , is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. This is the tablet that started Jaussen's collection.-Other names:D is the standard designation, from Barthel...

, the two sides are written in different hands: Side a is written with "large plain glyphs", while side b has "small fine glyphs" 5 mm high.

Text

Out of six lines of glyphs on side a, parts of four are visible; out of ten lines on side b, part of one is visible. Some 62 glyphs are preserved. As the two sides were written by different hands, the distinction of recto vs. verso may be irrelevant.