Rongorongo

Eugene Eyraud was the first European missionary to work on Easter Island. In the 1860s he noticed that many houses on the island contained wooden tablets with some sort of hieroglyphics on them. None of the islanders could, or would explain him the meaning of the inscriptions, known as rongorongo.

Nowadays only few of the tablets remain in museums and private collections. The tablets include tidy rows of small symbols that include animals, such as birds, plants, celestial objects and geometric figures.

It is thought the tablets were classified according to events such as wars and deaths, but there are many theories abound about their origin and function. Some believe the characters are ideographs like Chinese script, while others suggest connections with a similar script from antiquity found in the Indus River valley, in present Pakistan.