A lost manuscript called Rongo-rongo
The Rapanui culture has presented researchers with many perplexing questions, often referred to as mysteries. The Moai statues are perhaps the most famous of all the mysteries. How these stone giants were carved, transported and erected has preoccupied anthropologists for many decades.
A real mystery is the script – called rongo-rongo – which has been lost. Many have tried to decipher the script, including local Rapanui. A respected elder, Pua Arahoa, wrote down his knowledge and produced the largest known Rapanui manuscript in the early 20th century, which has been missing since the late 1950s. Recently, a set of photographs showing almost the entire manuscript was discovered in Chile and is now published by Rapa NuiPress: El Manuscrito de Pua Arahoa.
El Manuscrito de Pua Arahoa
José Miguel Ramirez Aliaga, Julio Hotus Salinas, and Betty Haoa Rapahango
The scripts of Pua Arahoa - the lost rongorongo manuscript
Rongorongo is one of the few unique manuscripts invented in the world and consists of figures carved in alternating lines in a flat piece of wood. "The original name - or perhaps the description - of the scripts is said to have been kohau motu mo rongorongo, "Tablet incised for chanting out", shortened to kohau rongorongo eller "tablet [for] chanting out". There are also supposed to have been more specific names for the texts based on their subject matter. For example was kohau taꞌu (year boards) annaler, kohau îka (fish boards) were lists of people killed in war (îka, which means that fish is a poetic term for war casualties), og kohau ranga "were lists of war refugees» were lists of war refugees. (translated and adapted from Wikipedia).
The first missionary on the island reported: “In every hut one finds wooden tablets or sticks covered with several kinds of hieroglyphic characters: they are representations of animals unknown on the island, which the natives draw with sharp stones. Each figure has its own name; but the scanty attention they pay to these tablets leads me to think that these characters, remnants of some primitive writing, are now to them a common practice which they keep without seeking the meaning."(Eyraud 1866:71) . Either influenced by the missionaries or by the fact that few respected them anymore, many of these rongorongo objects were burned or stored in secret caves during the following decades.
When Thor Heyerdahl was on Rapa Nui in 1955-56 he asked about rongorongo, and was lucky enough to receive a manuscript as a gift containing lines of rongorongo characters with rapanui translations and also some traditional chants. This manuscript was written by the elders of Rapanui, who tried to compile and preserve the ancient knowledge. This manuscript is today in the Thor Heyerdahl archive at the Kon-Tiki Museum.
During his stay on the island, Thor Heyerdahl also saw, acquired or had several pages from other manuscripts photographed. Nevertheless, the largest manuscript, unknown at the time to Heyerdahl, was later brought to mainland Chile where it came into the possession of Max Pulema Bunster. You can read more about this in an article by Reidar Solsvik entitled Correspondence between Thor Heyerdahl and Max Puelma Bunster regarding Rapanui Manuscript E published in Rapa Nui Journal, vol. 30, number 2, in October 2016.
Thor Heyerdahl tried unsuccessfully to persuade Bunster to publish his manuscript along with the others documented by the Norwegian archaeological expedition, in company with the papers on the recent rongorongo research in the early 1960s in his Reports of the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and the eastern Pacific. Volume 2. Miscellaneous Papers (1965).
An almost complete photographic set of the lost manuscript was rediscovered a few years ago. Thanks to the hard work of José Miguel Ramirez Aliaga, Julio Hotus Salinas and Betty Haoa Rapahango, the entire manuscript is published with comments in El Manuscrito de Pua Arahoa, by Rapa Nui Press, 2021.