Te Pito O Te Henua - The Navel of The World

Easter Island, a small island in the Southeastern Pacific, is perhaps most famous for its Moai. The Giant stone heads found on Easter Island are easily recognized around the world. But the Moai are not the only things unique to Easter Island.

Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is the only known Polynesian culture to develop its own writing system. Known as Rongorongo script, the Rapa Nuian script may be one of only 3 or 4 independent developments of a written language.

Few samples of Rongorongo writing have survived to date. Museums and Linguists have collected the few samples of the writing and studied them extensively. Despite these studies no has been able to translate the writings.

In Rapa Nui only the upper class learned how to write Rongorongo script, and due the rough first encounters Easter Island had with early explorers all knowledge of the script has been lost. King Nga’ara, died 1860, was the last person to master the Rongorongo script.

Even though no one has been able to read the Rongorongo writings, linguists have learned a few things about the writing. For instance the script is written using a system known as reverse boustrophedon.

When writing in Rongorongo the author would start at the bottom left corner and write from left to right until he hit an edge. Then the author would rotate the script 180 degrees (probably just rotating the writing material) and continue on the next line up.

With only a few remaining samples of Rongorongo script, and no one remaining who understands the script there are still many unanswered questions. The Rongorongo script remains a mystery and a rare anthropological treasure.

http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html
http://islandheritage.org/wordpress/

An example of reverse boustrophedon on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reverse_boustrophedon.png