I have now created two glyph indexes for the corpus: one for Barthel, one for Fischer. These indexes display the images for the glyphs. These are big files, because they display essentially the whole corpus in a single file. The Barthel index is 40MB and the Fischer is 70MB. The larger size for Fischer seems to be the result of having scanned and edited Fischer at 150% the size of Barthel.

These indexes are “warts and all.” As will be immediately obvious some glyphs are completely mislabeled.

Glyph index (Barthel)
Glyph index (Fischer)


Some other things to note:

  • The glyphs at the top are glyphs which ended up without any code number at all. This will have to be fixed. Similarly at the end of the index are glyphs with the code “_” (underscore). This is a placeholder code, that I have used throughout when I was in too much of a hurry to look up a code.
  • The numbers in brackets represent glyph counts. Note however this count always includes the total number of glyphs with the relevant code, whether they have an image or not. The count is “off” more often for Barthel (Fischer drew many glyphs that Barthel’s tracings do not show.)
  • One interesting thing that can be seen in this kind of display, are variations in “style”. For example glyph 007 (“reimiro”) as drawn on Tablet R has a very distinctive style with exaggerated, sharply-drawn “horns”.

3 Comments

  1. Approximately 100 corrections of various kinds made (mostly improved Barthel numbers). Improved svg pages, glyph index pages. Corpus database (for glyph search) updated.

  2. Many of the characters of rongorongo can be directly compared to various petroglyphs. I have identified a dozen already. This scenario would decrease the number of actual primary core characters to perhaps a dozen or so. The rest are companions and modifiers (of the actual image).

    I have recently published my book “So, Where is God?” In it, as a 4 page section, I show that rongorongo is not a script or language but what could be taken as a film strip. The film is the observations made by the original artists of the High-Energy Aurora. I would be happy to send you a copy of the section in PDF format.

    -Bill Petry

    • Dear Bill
      thanks for your comment. At least it is more germane to this site than all those Gucci bag adverts.

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