Rongorongo: The Lost Writing of Easter Island That No Living Soul Can Read
On the loneliest inhabited island on earth — a speck of volcanic rock in the vast emptiness of the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the nearest mainland — a people carved a system of writing so mysterious that no one alive can read a word of it. The island is Rapa Nui, which the outside world came to call Easter Island, famous for its great stone heads gazing out over the sea. But among its deepest riddles is a set of wooden tablets and objects covered in tiny, intricate glyphs: rows of birds, fish, plants, human and part-human figures, and abstract signs, carved with astonishing care into the hard wood. This script is called rongorongo, and it is one of the very few independently invented writing systems in the whole history of humankind. It is also, tragically, undeciphered. The knowledge of how to read it died with the people who made it, and despite more than a century and a half of effort, the tablets keep their meaning locked away, whispering in a voice no one can any long...