EASTER ISLAND—MBETRAUX 437 
had fallen, again emphasized their enigmatic relation to the lost civi- 
lization, of which the statues and great stone mausoleums as well as 
other finely wrought remains of the past were mute evidence. 
Then scientists began to study Easter Island. At what time and 
by what manner of men, they asked, were these images made, with 
their colossal bulk, their empty eyes and scornful expressions? Was 
the island the remnant of a sunken continent? Had it been inhabited 
by a powerful earlier race which had died out, or been destroyed and 
displaced by more warlike conquerors? Had eruptions of the vol- 
canoes exterminated the skilled craftsmen, the sculptors, and the archi- 
tects, leaving only a small group of people too discouraged and weak 
to continue the work of their forefathers? These are among the 
questions that still puzzle students. 
The statues symbolize the mystery of the island and have made it 
famous. Yet their paradoxical presence on this speck of land in 
the midst of the Pacific is perhaps less difficult to understand than 
are the wooden tablets covered with small incised designs that were 
collected from the natives in the second half of the last century. The 
tablets raised the fascinating question whether their makers used on 
them a kind of hieroglyphic script which might some day be de- 
ciphered and would unveil the secret of its past. But all attempts to 
decipher them, with the help of intelligent natives, failed. 
A few years ago the study of the tablets took an unexpected turn. 
A Hungarian linguist, Guillaume de Hevesy, published a long list 
of Easter Island hieroglyphs which, it was claimed, presented very 
striking analogies with the symbols of a newly discovered script found 
in the ruins of a civilization, 5,000 years old, in the Indus Valley at 
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. There, coetaneous with the Sumerian 
civilization, flourished large and opulent cities inhabited by people 
whose name and affiliations are totally unknown to us. They were 
wiped out probably at the time of the Aryan, and their existence re- 
mained unsuspected until the great excavations of Sir John Marshall. 
The Mohenjo-daro people have left a great many inscriptions on seals 
which have so far resisted any attempt at decipherment. If it could 
be shown that the two scripts were related, new light might be thrown 
on the obscure past of the whole Pacific area. 
The problem thus posed was of such significance for an under- 
standing of the early history of man that the French Government in 
association with the Belgian Government decided to organize an 
expedition to Easter Island to try to read its riddle. The leader of 
the expedition was a French archeologist, Charles Watelin, who, 
unfortunately, died in Tierra del Fuego. I was then asked to carry 
on the research, in association with the Belgian archeologist, Dr. Henry 
Lavachery. 
