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The Easter Island Tablets: Decipherments
A. Carroll
Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol.1 (1892)
233
THE EASTER ISLAND INSCRIPTIONS,
AND THE WAY IN WHICH THEY ARE TRANSLATED, OR
DECIPHERED, AND READ.
B
Y A. C
ARROLL, M.A., M.D.
St. Kilda, Kogarah, near Sydney, Australia,
October 6th, 1892.
TO THE HON.
SECRETARIES OF THE
POLYNESIAN SOCIETY.
GENTLEMEN,
In a letter of yours just received by me I find this
sentence therein:- "It would gratify a very widely
expressed desire if you would kindly give us a sketch
of the method you pursue in translating the tablets."
Having foreseen that some such wish might be expressed
by those interested in the Easter Island inscriptions,
I have been preparing a grammar and vocabulary as a key
to the inscriptions, and an explanation of how to read
the characters and the languages in or for which they
were cut or engraved, and I said so in the introduction
to the translations you expressed to me a wish to have
published in the Journal of the Journal of the Polynesian Society.
When this grammar and vocabulary, &c., is completed and
published, it will of course make everything so clear
that anyone will be able to learn, not only the key and
the mode of working out the decipherment, but the whole
of the subject, and allow them to translate the
inscriptions. But to make this key, grammar, and
vocabulary completely satisfactory will necessarily
occupy a considerable number of printed pages; and I
also find that I am still discovering fresh characters,
words, and grammatical forms in the inscriptions I have
received and am still reading; therefore the said keys,
grammar, and vocabulary of the several inscriptions are
still being added to. Thus both the bulk or volume of
what has been prepared and what is being added to it
will cause me to pause before publishing this at
present; but this will not prevent me giving a rapid
sketch of how I came to be able to learn what the
inscriptions contained, what they were about, and the
plan upon which they were written, &c. I therefore
proceed to give this information as under, that you,
and the readers of the Journal in which, with this
letter, it may be printed, may thus know how the
translations are made.
I have, &c.,
A. CARROLL.
IT is over thirty years ago since I began the study of
ancient writings, and having, as they became known,
examined the oldest hieroglyphics of Egypt,
Babylonia, India, Indo-China, and others discovered in
Asia, I became gradually convinced that a similar plan
was to be found among these, as the one system upon
which they