Did Easter Island inhabitants develop a written language before the arrival of Europeans?

Scientists have made a thrilling discovery while researching Easter Island’s Rongorongo script. Radiocarbon testing of some of the wooden tablets on which the script can still be found today has revealed that it probably predates the arrival of the Europeans on the island, also known as Rapa Nui. If the hieroglyphic characters really predate European influences, Rongorongo would be one of the very few independently developed scripts in human history.

Even though the enormous stone sculptures known as Moai are probably Easter Island’s best-known mystery, Rapa Nui’s script might be just as wondrous. The script was already documented in 1864 by a missionary called Eugene Eyraud, who mentioned the hieroglyphic characters were present on many wooden tablets and staffs. Sadly, nowadays, only 27 of those inscribed artefacts remain, all preserved within museums around the world and not yet deciphered. The only two tablets which had been dated before the new study, only go back to the 19^th century or after the arrival of the Europeans in the 18^th century.

A convent in Rome, the Congregazione dei Sacri Cuori di Gesù e di Maria, is one of the few institutions to preserve some of the Rongorongo script, with no less than four wooden tablets in its collection. Scientists from the University of Bologna, in Italy, decided to do radiocarbon testing on all four: three of the tablets were revealed to date back to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but there was one exception, which the researchers believe dates from somewhere between 1493 and 1509.

“If the date for its demise seems thus clear, the exact period in which Rongorongo developed remains unknown. The question is of crucial importance, as it implies the possibility of an independent invention of writing, similarly to what happened in other parts of the world where writing was an original creation, e.g., in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica. If Rongorongo predates the arrival of external travellers, it could represent another, and the latest, invention of writing in human history”, the researchers explained.

Moreover, the scientists argue that, even the later dating of the other three tablets “does not imply that the script they used was not [already] invented. Indeed, the glyphs differ from any known script and, even in terms of inventory, they have no close parallels.”