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The Rongorongo of Easter Island

The Indus Valley Hypothesis


This hypothesis is due to Guillaume de Hevesy, a Hungarian living in Paris, who dabbled in comparative linguistics, and who noticed some resemblance between the Indus Valley seal inscriptions and the rongorongo. Hevesy jumped to the conclusion: the rongorongo originated in the Indus Valley civilization. The hypothesis, first published in 1932, was generally well received, and caused such a flurry of interest that as late as 1939 the Journal of the Polynesian Society would publish, under the title "The Panis of the Rig Veda and Script of Mohenjo Daro and Easter Island," a piece against which A. Carroll's decipherments are a model of sober, restrained scholarship.

More on the Indus Valley hypothesis soon

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