Rongorongo

Rongorongo is undeciphered for almost the opposite reason to Linear A. Here the underlying language is not the wall: the tablets are presumed to record an older form of Rapa Nui, a Polynesian tongue still spoken on Easter Island today. It is nearly everything else that is missing. Only about two dozen genuine inscribed objects survive — some twenty-six pieces, nearly all carved wooden tablets, along with a chieftain's staff and a couple of ornaments — a corpus far too small, and too short, to crack. And it is written in reverse boustrophedon: the lines alternate direction and each is flipped upside down, so a reader turns the whole tablet 180° at the end of every row.

The chain of knowledge was severed almost overnight. In the 1860s, Peruvian slave raids, introduced epidemics, and missionary discouragement destroyed Rapa Nui society within a few years to decades, and the people who could still read the tablets died — taking the key with them. What modern Rapa Nui remains is heavily mixed with Tahitian and is unlikely to closely reflect the language of the carvings. The language survived in name; the reading did not.

The language survived. The readers did not.

There is a second silence on this very page. Rongorongo is still not encoded in Unicode — a proposal has circulated for years, but the tentative code range was withdrawn, and the script was not among the seven added in Unicode 16.0 in 2024. With no code points settled there is no font, so we cannot render a single sign here: the boxes above stand in for glyphs that no computer can yet draw. That gap — between a script that exists and a script a machine can show — is exactly what is on display in Floor 4's Tofu Room, and its unusual reading order is demonstrated in the same floor's Directionality Studio. The case itself sits sealed in the Undeciphered Vault.

The authentic corpus is roughly two dozen objects — about twenty-six pieces, of which only around half are in good condition and beyond doubt. They are almost all wooden: irregular tablets, sometimes cut from driftwood, together with the Santiago Staff (Text I, the longest inscription, on the order of two to three thousand glyphs) and the Mamari tablet (Text C, which carries the one sequence widely read as a lunar calendar). None remain on Easter Island; the pieces are scattered across museums on four continents.

Across the whole corpus there are on the order of fifteen thousand legible glyphs — a great many marks, but a very small and repetitive text for a decipherment. The reading order is reverse boustrophedon: begin at the bottom left, read a line left to right, then rotate the tablet 180° to read the next line, which was carved inverted relative to the one before it.