Text V 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, the Honolulu oar, also known as Honolulu tablet 3 or Honolulu 3622, may be one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

V 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 RR13.

Location

Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Catalog # B.03622.

Physical description

Apparently the end of a European or American oar, like tablet A

Rongorongo text A

Text A of the rongorongo corpus, also known as Tahua, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.-Other names:A is the standard designation, from Barthel...

, though of unknown wood, and cut with a steel blade. It measures 71.8 × 9 × 2.8 cm and is not fluted. Side a is worm-eaten and split at its thick end; side b has fire damage.

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.

Métraux (1938) did not include V as he did not think it was authentic:

The signs appear to have been incised with a steel implement, and do not show the regularity and beauty of outline which characterise the original tablets.

However, Barthel (1958:32) believed it to be authentic. Fischer is of the opinion that the burnt wood,

indicates that the inscription probably existed at the time that original rongorongo pieces were being annihilated by fire. More convincing evidence, however, that this is an authentic rongorongo inscription is the fact that the sequence 200.200.11-2 is shared with [A]a5 and [G]r8, while the sequence 200-700 is shared with [H]r10 and [H]r11. No post-missionary imitator could have effected this.

However, this reasoning is not sound: juxtaposing the two common glyphs 200 man and 700 fish is hardly remarkable. The only ligature is the 200.200.11-2, whereas known authentic texts, even short ones, have numerous ligatures.

Text

Side a has two areas of text: a single 22-glyph line, with a separate pair of glyphs slightly above and 4 cm to the right of this (on the other side of the label). Fischer reports that on side b pencil rubbings reveal possible traces of an inscription at the edge of the burnt area.

Fischer

Side a, as traced by Fischer. On the tablet, the pair of glyphs is completely separate from the main line.