Introduction
The purpose of this website is to serve as a resource for the study of the Rongorongo (the kohau motu mo rongorongo), a writing system which flourished (briefly?) on Easter Island. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, it remains undeciphered.
The features of this website
The Corpus
The primary corpus of items containing inscriptions universally recognized as Rongorongo consists of 25 items. These items are distributed in museums across the world, and many are extremely fragile. Of these
- 13 are preserved in more or less complete aspect with extensive inscriptions
- 3 are objects with small amounts of inscribed text
- 9 are fragments in varying degrees of deterioration
The texts of these items have been made accessible to us through the following works (see references):
- Thomas Barthel “Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift”
- Steven Fischer “Rongorongo”
- Paul Horley “Rongorongo”
This website contains the following resources:
- Corpus page allowing inspection of the text of the various items
- Search features allowing search of glyphs by “Barthel number”
- Snippet Collector allowing display of short segments from the corpus. Snippet Collections can be colored, and saved
- A Glyph Index which shows all occurrences of a glyph in the corpus
- Copy of defunct website rongorongo.org with extensive materials on Rongorongo
- OCRed copy of Barthel’s “Grundlagen”
- Dictionary of the Rapanui language by Father Englert (translated from Spanish by Jacques Guy)
Click for larger image.