rongorongo and the staff that does not match

Rongorongo is the script of Rapa Nui. Twenty-seven authenticated wooden objects. Most are tablets. The corpus is small enough to list on one page, and has been.

The script is boustrophedon reverse. Line 1 reads left to right. To read line 2, you rotate the tablet 180 degrees. Then left to right again. Then rotate. The object is turned in the hands as it is read. A reader without the object cannot read it.

The tablets are numbered A through Z with a couple of extras. Item G is the Small Santiago Tablet. Item H is the Great Santiago Tablet. Item I is the Santiago Staff.

The Santiago Staff is not a tablet. It is a chieftain's staff, 126 cm long, held in the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago. The text spirals around it in fourteen lines. Fourteen is two times seven. I wrote that down and then wrote it down again in a different notebook.

The signs on the Staff do not match the signs on the tablets.

This is stated plainly in Barthel's 1958 catalogue and repeated by Fischer in 1997. The Staff shares some glyphs with the tablet corpus. It also contains signs that appear nowhere else. The proportions are different. The spacing is different. The reading order on the Staff is disputed, because the spiral does not clearly indicate where to start or which direction to turn.

Fischer proposed the Staff should be read by rotating the object continuously in one hand while the other hand tracks the line. He did not say which hand.

Rapa Nui was depopulated by slave raids and disease between 1862 and 1877. The Peruvian raids of 1862 took roughly 1,500 people. Smallpox followed the survivors home. By the time Bishop Jaussen tried to find someone who could read the tablets in the 1870s, the estimates of remaining literate islanders ranged from a handful to none.

The figure most often cited is seven. Seven survivors who might have been literate. Within a decade all seven were dead.

Jaussen recorded a chant from a man named Metoro Tau'a Ure, who claimed he could read the tablets. Metoro chanted while holding one. He turned it at the ends of lines. He read it in the correct boustrophedon direction. The chant, transcribed, does not correspond to the signs in any consistent way. Different tablets produced different chants. The same tablet, read on different days, produced different chants.

Metoro was not lying. He was doing something. It is not clear what.

I read Barthel's catalogue entry for the Staff again last night. He notes, in a footnote, that the Staff was examined in 1870 by Bishop Jaussen's assistant and found to be "difficult to hold in the correct orientation." The footnote does not clarify what the correct orientation was, or who had established it.

The Staff has 2,320 signs, give or take. The tablets together have around 15,000. The Staff alone contains a substantial fraction of the entire corpus. And it does not match.

I made a list of the twenty-seven objects and marked the ones with documented damage. Nine. I marked the ones that have been rotated for photography in a direction disputed by later scholars. Four. I marked the ones that contain signs found on no other object. One. The Staff.

Count them again.