Could they depict a tale of Easter Island’s history? A glowing account of a past leader? Or could it just be a simple shopping list?
For more than a century, ancient glyphs (called rongorongo) on wooden tablets and sculptures found on Easter Island have had researchers scratching their heads.
Now, University of Warsaw researcher Dr Rafal Wieczorek is studying Otago Museum’s collection of Easter Island sculptures in an attempt to decipher them.
"Rongorongo script is a pictorial writing system, in the sense that the letters in this script are depicting objects like Egyptian hieroglyphs.
"They look like human beings, birds, sharks, chimeric creatures or material objects of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), but there are also figurines that are more abstract — we don’t really know what they mean."
He said because the island was isolated from the outside world until relatively recently, rongorongo had the potential of being one of only a few instances in human history of an independent invention of writing.
"They invented their own way of writing and, as of present, this writing system is undeciphered.
"In principle, it could say why they put the giant moai statues [monolithic human figures] there, or other things - it could be anything from a shopping list to war exploits."
He believed the key to deciphering the glyphs on the wooden tablets lay in understanding what the glyphs on the heads of moai kavakava (wooden statuettes) meant.
"They may act like the Rosetta Stone, which held the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs."
Dr Wieczorek has spent the past two weeks at Auckland Museum, Te Papa and Otago Museum, creating 3-D photographic images of the moai kavakava.
He planned to take the photos back to Warsaw, where he would study them in more detail and hopefully use them to decipher the text on rongorongo tablets.
"My interest is in documenting them, and comparing them to see if there are any patterns emerging.
"We are working on the script and trying to decipher it and, of course, we are getting various hints all the time."
