Editing Rongorongo (section)

==Historical record==

===Discovery===
[[Eugène Eyraud]], a lay friar of the [[Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary|Congrégation de Picpus]], landed on Easter Island on January 2, 1864, on the 24th day of his departure from [[Valparaíso]]. He was to remain on Easter Island for nine months, evangelizing its inhabitants. He wrote an account of his stay in which he reports his discovery of the tablets that year:<ref>Eyraud 1866</ref>

{{blockquote|In every hut one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered in several sorts of hieroglyphic characters: They are depictions of animals unknown on the island, which the natives draw with sharp stones. 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.{{refn|{{lang|fr|Dans toutes les cases on trouve des tablettes de bois ou des bâtons couverts de plusieurs espèces de caractères hiéroglyphiques: ce sont des figures d'animaux inconnues dans l'île, que les indigènes tracent au moyen de pierres tranchantes. Chaque figure a son nom; mais le peu de cas qu'ils font de ces tablettes m'incline à penser que ces caractères, restes d'une écriture primitive, sont pour eux maintenant un usage qu'ils conservent sans en chercher le sens.}}|group="note"}}|Eyraud 1866:71}}

There is no other mention of the tablets in his report, and the discovery went unnoticed. Eyraud left Easter Island on October 11 1864, in extremely poor health. Ordained a priest in 1865, he returned to Easter Island in 1866 where he died of tuberculosis in August 1868, aged{{nbsp}}48.

===Destruction===
In 1868 the Bishop of Tahiti, [[Florentin-Étienne Jaussen|Florentin-Étienne "Tepano" Jaussen]], received a gift from the recent Catholic converts of Easter Island. 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. But Roussel could only recover a few, and the islanders could not agree on how to read them.<ref>Fischer 1997:21–24</ref>

However, Eyraud had seen hundreds of tablets only four years earlier. What happened to the missing tablets is a matter of conjecture. Eyraud had noted how little interest their owners had in them. [[Stéphen Chauvet]] reports that:

{{blockquote|The Bishop questioned the Rapanui wise man, Ouroupano Hinapote, the son of the wise man Tekaki [who said that] he, himself, had begun the requisite studies and knew how to carve the characters with a small shark's tooth. 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!

[[Alphonse Pinart|A. Pinart]] also saw some in 1877. [He] was not able to acquire these tablets because the natives were using them as reels for their fishing lines!|Chauvet 1935:381–382}}

Orliac has observed that the deep black indentation, about {{convert|10|cm|in|sp=us}} long, on lines 5 and 6 of the recto of [[Rongorongo text H|tablet '''H''']] is a groove made by the rubbing of a fire stick, showing that tablet '''H''' had been used for fire-making.<ref>Orliac 2005a</ref> Tablets '''S''' and '''P''' had been cut into lashed planking for a canoe, which fits the story of a man named Niari who made a canoe out of abandoned tablets.<ref>Routledge 1919:207</ref>

As European-introduced diseases and raids by Peruvian slavers, including a final devastating raid in 1862 and a subsequent smallpox epidemic, had reduced the Rapa Nui population to under two hundred by the 1870s, it is possible that literacy had been wiped out by the time Eyraud discovered the tablets in 1864.{{refn|Métraux (1940) reports that, "The present population of 456 natives is entirely derived from the 111 natives left after the abandonment of the island by the French missionaries in 1872."<ref>Métraux 1940:3</ref> However, Routledge (1919) gives a figure of 171 left after an evacuation led by Father Roussel in 1871, mostly old men,<ref>Routledge 1919:208</ref> and Cooke (1899) states that the evacuation of some 300 islanders was in 1878, that "When H. M. S. ''Sappho'' touched at the island in 1882 it was reported that but 150 of the inhabitants were left", and goes on to give a summary of a complete census he received from Salmon in 1886 which listed 155 natives and 11 foreigners.<ref>Cooke 1899:712</ref>|group="note"}}

Thus in 1868 Jaussen could recover only a few tablets, with three more acquired by Captain Gana of the Chilean corvette ''[[Chilean corvette O'Higgins (1866)|O'Higgins]]'' in 1870. In the 1950s Barthel found the decayed remains of half a dozen tablets in caves, in the context of burials. However, no glyphs could be salvaged.<ref>Barthel 1959:162–163</ref>{{refn|Fischer translates Barthel, concerning four of these tablets: "To judge by the form, size, and type of keeping one can say with a high degree of certainty that this involved tablets that were presented at two interments."<ref>Fischer 1997:526</ref>|group="note"}}

Of the 26 commonly accepted texts that survive, only half are in good condition and authentic beyond doubt.<ref>Fischer 1997:Appendices</ref>

===Anthropological accounts===
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. She was able to interview two elderly informants, Kapiera and a leper named Tomenika, who allegedly had some knowledge of rongorongo. The sessions were not very fruitful, as the two often contradicted each other. From them Routledge concluded that rongorongo was an idiosyncratic mnemonic device that did not directly represent language, in other words, [[proto-writing]], and that the meanings of the glyphs were reformulated by each scribe, so that the {{lang|rap|kōhau rongorongo}} could not be read by someone not trained in that specific text. The texts themselves she believed to be litanies for priest-scribes, kept apart in special houses and strictly ''[[Tapu (Polynesian culture)|tapu]]'', that recorded the island's history and mythology.<ref>Routledge 1919:253–254</ref>{{refn|However, Pozdniakov & Pozdniakov (2007) believe that the limited and repetitive nature of the texts precludes them recording anything as diverse as history or mythology.|group="note"}} By the time of later ethnographic accounts, such as [[Métraux]] (1940), much of what Routledge recorded in her notes had been forgotten, and the oral history showed a strong external influence from popular published accounts.