Rongorongo: The Script That Died With Its Readers

2026-01-18 · Unsolved Ciphers · 2 min read

When European missionaries settled on Rapa Nui — Easter Island — in 1864, one of them noticed something extraordinary. In hut after hut, islanders kept flat wooden tablets covered in rows of tiny, meticulously carved glyphs: birdmen, fish, plants, strange geometric figures. Eugène Eyraud, a French lay brother, reported that these tablets could be found in almost every house. Within a few years, nearly all of them were gone.

The timing could hardly have been crueler. In 1862 and 1863, Peruvian slave raiders abducted around 1,500 islanders — among them chiefs, priests and much of the learned elite. Smallpox and other epidemics came back with the few survivors, and the population collapsed. By the time Bishop Tepano Jaussen of Tahiti began collecting the tablets in 1868, the people who could actually read them were dead, and the islanders who remained treated the script as sacred but silent.

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