Text T of the rongorongo

Rongorongo

Rongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, not even...

corpus, also known as Honolulu tablet 1 or Honolulu 3629, is the only fluted tablet in the Honolulu collection and one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

T is the standard designation, from Barthel

Thomas Barthel

Thomas Sylvester Barthel was a German ethnologist and epigrapher who is best known for cataloguing the undeciphered rongorongo script of Easter Island....

 (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR11.

Location

Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Catalog # B.03629.

Physical description

A broken, decayed piece of a tablet, 31 × 12.5 × 2.5 cm of unknown wood. There are faint ridges, perhaps the remnants of fluting. It has been heavily damaged by moisture, fire, and insects on both sides, but with more water damage on side b, as well as splitting and a long gouge down the center. Métraux (1938) said of the Honolulu tablets T and U that,

Probably these tablets were kept for some time in a cave, and the side lying on the ground was greatly injured by the damp soil.

He was of the opinion that T had once been a fine artifact:

The same skill and the same vigour of design, which made the best tablets of Easter Island real works of art, characterise the execution of this tablet.

Provenance

Collector J. L. Young of Auckland

Auckland

The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...

 purchased three of the Honolulu tablets circa 1888 "from Rapanui through a reliable agent", who Fischer (1997) thinks was probably Alexander Salmon, Jr

Alexander Salmon, Jr

Alexander Ariipaea Vehiaitipare Salmon Jr. was the English-Jewish-Tahitian co-owner of the Maison Brander plantations on Tahiti and de facto ruler of Easter Island from 1878 till its cession to Chile in 1888.-Family:...

. It was transferred to the Bishop Museum in August 1920.

Content

Ta is the only text, apart from the single line of Gv

Rongorongo text G

Text G of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets located in Santiago and therefore also known as the Small Santiago tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. It may include a short genealogy.-Other names:...

which Butinov and Knorozov suggested might be a genealogy, that parallels the glyph triplets of the Staff

Rongorongo text I

Text I of the rongorongo corpus, also known as the Santiago Staff, is the longest of the two dozen surviving rongorongo texts. Statistical analysis suggests that its contents are distinct.-Other names:...

(Pozdniakov 1996).

Text

Despite its condition, this is the best preserved of the Honolulu tablets. Side a has eleven lines, of which nine with some 150 glyphs are visible, out of an original somewhere around 400.

Side b is illegible. Fischer (1997) made pencil rubbings of this side, but the results were too faint to be legible. He suggests that electronic scanning techniques might be able to retrieve some of the text.

Barthel
Fischer