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CHAPTER VIII
MYSTERIOUS SCRIPT OF EASTER ISLAND
"MYSTERIOUS" PROBLEM
A quiet and remote islet, 70 sq. m. in area, lost in the Pacific Ocean, about 2,500 miles west of the coast of Chile, to whom it belongs, and about 1,750 miles east of the Gambier islands, presents many mysteries to the romantic imagination. Various peculiar "prehistoric" remains have been discovered there, among them about 200 colossal stone images; two typical specimens are in the British Museum. Some of the images are over 30 feet high; they are carved out of a reddish brown trachitic lava, quarried in the island at some distance from their present position, where they stand in rows facing the sea.
There are also immense walls of large, flat stones, likewise facing the sea, upon slopes and headlands, while some 250 huge stone pedestals, burial-places, known as ahui, are placed on the land side of the walls on a broad terrace, upon which the images were standing. Remains of stone houses nearly 100 feet long by z0 feet wide are also to be seen, and like all these monuments are now in ruins.
These "prehistoric" remains, in striking contrast with the smallness of the number of the present population-some 200-give sufficient food to the mysterymongers for fancy stories of relics of antediluvian days, of a race of giants who once inhabited the island, of the "Lemuria," the vast continent of the Pacific Ocean lost in remote ages.
On this very island, some wooden tablets covered with pictographic writing, unique in Polynesia, have been noted since the late sixties of the last century.
FACTS
Easter Island, christened so by the Dutch admiral J. Roggeveen who discovered it on Easter Day, 1722, is not its only name; the Spaniards called it San Carlos, the natives Te Pito ("navel")-te-Henua ("earth") or Rapa-nui ("Great Rapa"); it is also termed Waihu or "Land's End." It lies in 27° 10' S. lat., 109 20' W. long.; is entirely volcanic, triangular in shape and curiously symmetrical.
The main problems which the fancy stories try to solve are the following: When and whence came the aboriginal inhabitants of the island? did they emigrate from South America or from the Polynesian Islands? were the stone-images made by the ancestors of the present natives or by a previous people? when, where and how was the script created and what was its actual character?
The serious scholars who dealt with this matter are more or less in agreement in regard to the general problems; the natives seem to be of Polynesian origin with a considerable Melanesian, negroid, admixture; there is no evidence of a culture previous to that of the ancestors of the present natives; according to some local traditions, corroborated by other evidence, the immigration of the earliest inhabitants should be assigned to the twelfth or thirteenth century A.D. The problem of the origin of the script, however, is still a moot point.
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