EASTER ISLAND—METRAUX 447 
tion to the rows of designs as he chanted and did not repeat his words 
when the same tablet was put into his hands a second time. He was, 
therefore, thought to be a fraud and was dismissed. 
As I have already said, a definite clue to the enigma of this so-called 
“seript” seemed at last to have been discovered 7 years ago, when Mr. 
de Hevesy pointed out a series of analogies between some of these 
Easter Island designs and those of an old Asiatic script found on stone 
and clay seals in the ruins of two forgotten cities, Mohenjo-daro and 
Harappa, in the valley of the Indus. Now, archeologists agree in 
thinking that the civilization of the Indus region dates from about 
3000 B. C. Its people were an unknown race that knew how to build 
planned cities with a complicated sewerage system. The script they 
used is still undeciphered, but hypotheses about it have been ad- 
vanced which, if substantiated, would make it one of the earliest 
known forms of man’s writing. Some Orientalists see striking anal- 
ogies between this Mohenjo-daro script and the early Chinese 
hieroglyphs. 
Although the relationship between Easter Island “script” and that 
of the Indus has been accepted widely as a demonstrated fact, I can- 
not help being skeptical for several reasons. The Indus civilization, 
contemporaneous with that of Sumeria and Egypt, was extinct by 
2000 B.C. Easter Island culture died out only 80 years ago. Roughly 
15,000 miles of land and sea separate the Indus Valley from the island. 
Between them lie India, Indonesia, and enormous wastes of water. 
In other respects Mohenjo-daro and Easter Island have nothing in 
common: the arts of the Indus, like weaving, pottery, and metal 
working, were unknown to the remote islanders. The proud city 
dwellers of Mohenjo-daro would have looked down upon the half- 
naked people who lived in thatched huts, and indulged in cannibalism. 
How could two such different and widely separated peoples have shared 
the same form of writing? 
In order to answer this question, Mr. de Hevesy advanced the theory 
that the Easter Island tablets are many centuries, if not millenniums, 
old and were brought to Easter Island by the first immigrants. Here 
the evidence that remains is against him. The wood of the best and 
largest Easter Island tablet is that of a European oar. Besides, if 
Hevesy’s theory were to be accepted we should have to make the diffi- 
cult assumption that the Easter Islanders kept their script unchanged 
for more than 5,000 years. A careful analysis of the tablets and the 
Indus script has not borne out this theory. True, some of the signs in 
the Indus script have striking analogies with those of Easter Island. 
I am, nevertheless, still more impressed by the divergencies, and by 
the doubtfulness of parallels based only on a few cases which take no 
account of many variants of the same design. 
