448 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
Moreover, there is little question, I believe, that the designs on the 
tablets were created by natives of Easter Island. It would be difficult 
to explain on any other assumption the presence among them of so 
many figures of animals belonging to the local fauna and of objects 
that are found, as far as is known, in its culture only. Mr. de Hevesy 
interpreted certain of the Easter Island symbols as representations of 
monkeys and elephants, but for these suggestions of India’s jungle 
life he drew on his imagination. 
In the hope of throwing some light on the mystery, I applied to sev- 
eral tablets an analytical method. I counted their symbols and studied 
their combinations to find out whether they might constitute an actual 
script. If the symbols represented sounds, the same signs would have 
been combined in the same order whenever a word was repeated. 
But this seldom happens. The same combinations of the same sym- 
bols recur in only a very few cases. The individual designs are re- 
peated over and over again but apparently in haphazard order. No 
clue to a script.came from this study. 
If we might assume that the tablets contain an actual script, the 
question would arise whether it were pictographic or ideographic. 
To answer this there are not enough different symbols. Most of them 
are variants of about a hundred fundamental designs. On certain 
tablets the same signs form a high percentage of the total. 
Assuming that the Easter Island tablets contained a script, I thought 
it likely for a long time that this was based on the same principle 
as the designs inscribed on birchbark by the Ojibway Indians, who 
record charms by means of figures which sometimes remind us of 
the Easter Island symbols. From the images drawn on bark, the In- 
dian shaman reads a text which, to his mind, they represent. The 
Cuna Indians of Panama still use the same primitive form of writing. 
But one thing made me suspicious of such an interpretation. The 
Easter Island tablets are pieces of wood of various odd shapes which 
are always covered with designs from one end to the other And on both 
sides. If their contents corresponded to a script text, this would mean 
that the artist always knew in advance just the size and shape of the 
piece of wood his chant would fill. As this seemed highly improbable, 
I was obliged to abandon this entire hypothesis and seek for some 
better clue to the mystery. 
I found it in a link that has been kept between the tablets and the 
oral traditions, songs, and prayers of the Easter Islanders. The very 
word that the natives use for the tablets puts us on the right track. 
They are called kohau rongorongo, which means literally “orator 
staff”—that is, the stick, sometimes decorated with carved symbols, 
sometimes not—which a speaker holds in his hands while making a 
public address or reciting a piece of traditional lore, as if to give added 
significance to his words. The rongorongo were professional chanters 
