00:00Welcome to Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island.
00:03It's a tiny speck in the vast Pacific Ocean, 2,200 miles away from the coast of Chile.
00:09This island is most famous for its eerie Moai statues.
00:13This place is also home to one of the most mysterious writing systems in the world, called Ronga Ronga.
00:20We found it on 27 small wooden tablets.
00:24For years, historians have been arguing about the true history of these tablets.
00:28And now, we might have found the truth.
00:32Humans first set foot on this island in the 12th century.
00:35For many years, it was home to the Rapa Nui people.
00:38They were pretty isolated out there in the Pacific Ocean, until Europeans arrived in the 1720s.
00:44Europeans brought with them lots of troubles, leaving only a small fraction of the native population alive.
00:51Later in the 19th century, a missionary, Eugene Iroh,
00:55went to the island and discovered the wooden tablets with intricate symbols carved on them.
01:00He wrote how marvelous they are.
01:02But there are hundreds of them on the island, and that they can be found in every household.
01:07But unfortunately, not all of them survive to this day.
01:11We've only got 27 of them.
01:13Some of them were heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged.
01:16And now, they're scattered all over the world in museums and private collections.
01:20Some of the languages' artifacts were carted off to Tahiti and then to Europe by Europeans,
01:26leaving none behind on Easter Island itself.
01:30The four sacred tablets found their home in a congregation in Rome.
01:34They were the ones used in the recent discovery.
01:37For years, historians have been arguing whether this writing system was made up by the islanders themselves,
01:44or they borrowed it from Europeans.
01:45To find the truth, they decided to use a technique called radiocarbon dating.
01:51All organic materials, like wood, charcoal, and so on,
01:55contain a tiny amount of a radioactive form of carbon called carbon-14.
02:00When life comes to an end, things stop taking in carbon-14,
02:05and the amount they had starts to decay over time.
02:08By measuring how much carbon-14 is left in a sample,
02:12we can assume how old this sample is.
02:14This is how we learn the age of many fossils and artifacts.
02:18So, they looked at the age of some Ranga-Ranga tablets.
02:21Three of them were crafted from trees grown in the 18th or 19th century,
02:25which aligns with the arrival of Europeans.
02:28However, one of them is older than the Europeans' first visit to the island.
02:34There are two reasons to believe that Rapa Nui people created this writing system themselves.
02:40First, Ranga-Ranga works differently from European languages.
02:44Decoding it is a pretty hard task.
02:47Unlike English, this language boasts over 400 unique glyphs,
02:51none of which resemble any known writing system.
02:54There were many attempts to decipher this language, and none of them were successful so far.
02:59And second, one of the tablets is shown to be from around the 15th century,
03:04before the Europeans arrived.
03:06The problem is that radiocarbon dating can only tell us when the wood the tablet was made from
03:11was cut down, not when the writing was put on it.
03:15And since we've only got one tablet to go by, this isn't enough to be completely sure.
03:20On the other hand, why and where would they preserve cut wood for over 200 years
03:26just to grab it and write something on it one day?
03:28But anthropologists and historians say that it's possible.
03:33Scarce wood resources might have led the islanders to reuse old driftwood,
03:38which could be centuries older than the writing itself.
03:41This is known as the old wood problem in archaeology.
03:44Plus, the tablet looks very preserved.
03:47It was maintained to protect it from wood-damaging insects, humidity, and so on.
03:52That's why it survived over the centuries.
03:55Whatever is written on it, it was probably important for the Rapa Nui people.
03:59Now, all of these are guesses and clues, but scientists are cautiously optimistic.
04:05They believe that Ronga Ronga could be one of the rare instances of independent writing invention,
04:11like those of the Sumerians or the Egyptians.
04:13But we need more evidence.
04:15In the Rapa Nui language, Rogo Rogo means to recite or to declaim.
04:21Not everyone could write, only a select few.
04:24Probably only the elite of Easter Island, mostly men, knew and could read this written language.
04:30After colonization, none of them survived.
04:33So now we have to rack our brains trying to figure out what's written here.
04:38First, scholars can't agree on what type of script it is.
04:42We aren't even sure that this was their language.
04:44But even if it was, we don't know whether it's a primitive form of writing or a fully developed system.
04:51In the 1990s, a linguist, Stephen Roger Fisher, believed he might have cracked the code of Ronga Ronga's structure.
04:59His idea was that these tablets conveyed cosmogonies.
05:02Cosmogonies are stories or narratives that explain how the universe was created and how natural phenomena came to be.
05:11They often come from ancient traditions and cultures, like those found in East Polynesia.
05:16The tablets could have talked about things like how the world began, where everything came from,
05:21and how different aspects of nature, like the stars or the mountains, were formed.
05:25This would also explain why only the wise elite could write.
05:30Fisher thought that Ronga Ronga is a mix of logographic and samasiagraphic systems,
05:36which means that some symbols represent spoken words, while others represent ideas or concepts.
05:42But deciphering them would be very hard because it requires extensive memory and knowing context,
05:48because the symbols are more like hints than complete expressions.
05:51However, other language experts disagreed with his ideas,
05:56saying there were problems with how he put together his theory.
06:00Unfortunately, Fisher couldn't prove this hypothesis.
06:04Maybe these are just drawings.
06:06If we look at the tablets, there are some things that look recognizable.
06:10People, animals, plants, and geometric shapes.
06:13There are some birds.
06:15One of them looks like a frigate bird, which Rapa Nui people associate with the deity Maki Maki.
06:20There are also fish, centipedes, and so on.
06:23Or at least these glyphs look like them.
06:26Could it be just art or a form of decoration?
06:29Maybe.
06:30But there are some problems.
06:32The glyphs show a high degree of complexity and structure.
06:35They also keep the same style.
06:37For example, there are several symbols that show something human-like with a raised hand.
06:42The only difference is different heads.
06:45As if it wasn't complicated enough,
06:46This unique writing style also uses a system known as Reverse Oostrophodon.
06:52This means that each alternate line is flipped upside down,
06:56resembling nothing seen elsewhere.
06:58We don't know why they would turn the tablet upside down after each line.
07:02But all this shows that they had some sort of system and organization behind these symbols.
07:08Plus, it seems like they use these tablets every day for some practical purpose.
07:13But there's some hope for the future.
07:16New technology, like AI and other computer programs,
07:19might help us understand lost languages.
07:22We already started creating algorithms that could help us solve other mysteries,
07:26like the Voynich manuscript.
07:29Academics even organized the Vesuvius Challenge,
07:32a machine learning competition that, in 2023,
07:35cracked the riddle of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls.
07:38The scrolls were buried under volcanic mud after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
07:46In real life, the scrolls are very fragile,
07:49so deciphering them would be a very hard task.
07:52But with digital scanning and machine learning, it's much easier.
07:56They have a rich history.
07:58They most likely belong to the personal library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus.
08:03These scrolls contain very important insights into Greek philosophy and Latin literature.
08:09If we decipher more of them,
08:11we'll learn more about the rich history of the Roman Empire.
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