Text R of the rongorongo corpus, the smaller of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Small Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

R is the standard designation, from Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR15. This piece is commonly known as Atua Mata Riri, after the first name in a chant that Ure Vae Iko sang to a photograph of one of Jaussen's tablets, possibly B or H. The error, if it is one, may be due to a misattribution in the Smithsonian publication of Thomson's book (Fischer).

Location

Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Catalog # A129773. There is a reproduction in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.

Description

A short, curved, unfluted tablet, 24 × 9 × 1.8 cm, pitted and with one end broken off, made of unknown wood. There is a hole in the middle of the straight edge, probably for hanging. Short segments of the four middle lines have been obliterated on the right side of side b.

Provenance

In December 1886, Thomson bought both Washington tablets on Easter Island with the mediation of his Tahitian aide Alexander Salmon "after a great deal of trouble and at considerable expense". He gave both to the Smithsonian in April 1890. The Smithsonian catalog says,

Contents

Nearly all of R consists of sequences found in other texts (Pozdniakov and Pozdniakov 2007).

Text

Side a has eight lines (Fischer suspects there may once have been nine), and side b nine lines, for ~ 460 glyphs in all. The edges of the tablet are inscribed.

Image gallery