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The Easter Island Tablets: Decipherments

A. Carroll


Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol.1 (1892)

233

383x73 GIF

THE EASTER ISLAND INSCRIPTIONS,

AND THE WAY IN WHICH THEY ARE TRANSLATED, OR DECIPHERED, AND READ.

BY A. CARROLL, 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

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