Text S of the rongorongo corpus, the larger of two tablets in Washington and therefore also known as the Great or Large Washington tablet, is one of two dozen surviving rongorongo texts.

Other names

S is the standard designation, from Barthel (1958). Fischer (1997) refers to it as RR16.

Location

Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Catalog # A129774. There is a reproduction in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.

Physical description

S is a long bevelled but not fluted driftwood board of Podocarpus latifolius wood (Orliac 2007), 63 × 12 × 1.6 cm, that curves to a point at one end. It was cut into a plank for a canoe (Fischer believes line Sb1 was planed for this purpose), and twelve holes were bored along the perimeter for lashings. Both sides were heavily damaged by fire for "a great loss of text".

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. Fischer (1997) states that this and Mamari are "the only authentic rongorongo artefacts whose premissionary owners are known by name." Thomson was told that "The large one [S] is a piece of drift-wood, that from its peculiar shape is supposed to have been used as a portion of a canoe". Thirty years later, Routledge was told the same: Fischer (1997) reports that in her field notes, Routledge documented that the tablets had belonged to Puhi a Rona, a tuhunga tâ (scribe) of Hanga Hahave, whose house "was full of tablets and [he] scindered them at the call of the missionaries". (This may explain the fire damage.) It was Nicolás Pakarati who sold it to Thomson. Although the missionaries have been blamed for the burning of the tablets, in the manner of the Mayan codices, there is no hint of this in their own writings, and the few missionaries who were active on Easter Island at the time either ignored the tablets (Eyraud) or attempted to collect them (Roussel). If tablets were burned after conversion to Christianity, it may have been part of a more general pattern of abandoning the old religion. The Smithsonian catalog states,

Content

Fischer (1997) identifies a list of short sequences, each beginning with the glyph 380.1, as a pattern shared between the Large Washington (lines 3-4 and 6 on side a) and several other tablets.

Text

There are eight lines of glyphs on side a and nine on side b, with ~ 730 recogniza****ble glyphs out of an original 1,200 or so. The edges of the plank are inscribed.

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