Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island's history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script's mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhat isolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limited natural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over the following years the island's population of four thousand or so was slowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slave traders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitants remained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strange language was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, and forbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced the inhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.

In 1864, Father Joseph Eyraud became the first non-islander to record Rongorongo. Writing before the ultimate decline of the Eastern Island society, he noted that "one finds in all the houses wooden tables or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphs." Despite his interest in the subject, he was not able to find an Islander willing to translate the texts. The islanders were understandably reluctant to help, given that the Europeans forcefully suppressed the use of their native writing.

Rongorongo TabletsSome time later, Bishop Florentin Jaussen of Tahiti attempted to translate the texts. A young Easter Islander named Metero claimed to be able to read Rongorongo, and for fifteen days the bishop kept a record while the boy dictated from the inscriptions. Bishop Jaussen gave up the effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy had assigned several meanings to the same symbol.

In 1886 Paymaster William Thompson of the ship USS Mohican became interested in the pictographic system during a journey to collect artifacts for the National Museum in Washington. He had obtained two rare tablets engraved with the script and was curious about their meaning. He asked eighty-three-year-old islander Ure Va'e Iko for assistance in translation because his age made him more likely to have knowledge of the language. The man reluctantly admitted to knowing what the tablets said, but did not wish to break the orders of the missionaries. As a result, Ure Va'e Iko refused to touch the tablets, let alone decipher them.

Thompson was determined, however, and decided that Ure Va'e Iko might be more forthcoming under the influence of alcohol. After having a few drinks kindly provided by Thompson, the Easter Islander looked at the tablets once again. The old man burst into song, singing a fertility chant which described the mating of gods and goddesses. William Thompson and his companions quickly took down his words. This was potentially a big breakthrough, but Thomson struggled with assigning words to the pictographs. Furthermore, he couldn't find another Islander who was willing to confirm the accuracy of this translation. While Thompson was ultimately unable to read Rongorongo, the translation that Iko provided has remained one of the most valuable clues on how to decipher the tablets.

An Indus valley connection?In the following decades, many scholars have attempted to make sense of this mystery. In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy tried to link Rongorongo to the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. Further examination found this link to be much more superficial than originally believed. In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel became one of the first linguists of the modern era to make a study of Rongorongo. He stated that system contained 120 basic elements that, when combined, formed 1500 different signs. Furthermore, he asserted that the symbols represented both objects and ideas. This made it more difficult to produce a translation because an individual symbol could potentially represent an entire phrase. Barthel was successful, however, in identifying an artifact known as the Mamri tablet as a lunar calendar.

Some of the most recent research has been conducted by a linguist named Steven Fischer. Having studied nearly every surviving example of Rongorongo, he took particular interest in a four-foot-long scepter that had once been the property of an Easter Island Chief. The artifact is covered in pictographs, and Fischer noticed that every third symbol on this staff has an additional "phallus-like" symbol attached to it. This led Fischer to believe that all Rongorongo texts have a structure steeped in counts of three, or triads. He has also studied Ure Va'e Iko's fertility chant, which lent additional support to the concept. Iko had always named a god first, his goddess mate second, and their offspring third. Fischer has also tried to make the claim that all Rongorongo texts relate creation myths. Looking at another text, he has suggested that a sentence with a symbol of a bird, a fish, and a sun reads "All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun." While this could be the translation, it bears little resemblance to Ure Va'e Iko's chant about the matings of gods and goddesses.

Rongorongo naturally commands a great deal of interest from linguists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Only twenty-five texts are know to have survived. Should anyone find a workable translation for Rongorongo, the knowledge stored on the remaining tablets might explain the mysterious statues of Easter Island, the sudden appearance of the written language, and the island's history and customs as whole. However, much like the statues which have so captivated popular imagination, Rongorongo has so far defied all attempts at explanation.

Although, while sky watching, I could see flashes in the sky-like a camera flashes. I also observed these white things of size high in the sky from a distance, facing south towards the lake .I'll leave it up to you in evaluating.

Take care and a Happy NEW Year to you and all.

Paul

On the rock, a 14-by-13-inch slab that dates from the Mississippian Period (1000-1450 A.D.), is an artistic image that the ancient inhabitants of a mound site etched into its surface with primitive stone tools.

But the artifact is coveted more for what is not etched onto its face than what is.

"It's unique because it is the only slab of six found that does not have clear Southeastern Ceremonial Complex symbols on it," Brown said.

He has quizzed collector groups, questioned fellow archaeologists and talked to "just about anyone who might come into contact with this kind of item."
"It's like fishing the ocean," Brown said.

So far he's had nary a nibble.

"There's an excellent chance this piece of history is sitting in somebody's rock garden or on some kid's dresser as a trinket," said Brown, who is based in Oak Ridge.

Brown said the slab isn't stolen property, and he is not interested in purchasing it. Professional archaeologists do not collect, buy, sell or appraise prehistoric artifacts, he said. He simply wants to examine it, make some notes, measure it, photograph it and give it right back to the person who owns it.

"What many people don't know about archaeology is that the item itself isn't as important as how the item fits into the 'big picture' with other items found at a site," he said. "It's like a giant puzzle where you know you're never going to find all the pieces. So you try to find as many as you can."

Unusual symbols on slab

Southeastern Ceremonial Complex symbols are found on Mississippian Period artifacts from sites throughout the Southeast and as far west as eastern Oklahoma. At one time, the somewhat bizarre symbols were interpreted as important elements of a pan-Southeastern American Indian religion with a strong emphasis on sun veneration and human death.

The slab in question does feature a snake, which is common as symbols go. "But taken as a whole, the individual symbols and the picture on this stone do not have an SCC flavor about them," Brown said. "This is important and at least suggests that the iconography on the stone may be more personal in nature and important to the life of one or more individuals in an ancient society."

Although the ancient tales told by the missing slab take place more than a thousand years ago, the story about the slab begins in the mid-1990s, which is when it went missing.

The widow of a collector apparently gave it away.

"All together, she probably gave away $100,000 in artifacts for nothing," Brown said. "The person who got them for free ended up selling them to collectors. Some of the items were bigger-ticket items, but the slab I'm looking for was probably among a large group of items that might have went for 10, 15 or 20 bucks at a flea market."

Six slabs found in area

The missing slab - one of six that have been discovered in Middle Tennessee - was found at a large Mississippian site in east Nashville in the autumn of 1968. A now-deceased local artifact collector, Malcolm Parker, former director of The Parthenon, found the incised slab in a stone box at an original burial site.

The first of the six slabs was discovered on Rocky Creek in Trousdale County
in 1874 and was named after Gates P. Thruston, a Nashville-area antiquarian who authored Antiquities of Tennessee in 1890.

The slab, now known as the Thruston Tablet, was interpretated by Thruston as a commemoration of an important political or social event in the life of a local Mississippian Period community, Brown said.

The second stone was found at the Castalian Springs mound site, now owned by the state, in Sumner County in 1892. Etchings on that stone show the upper body of a human figure ceremonially dressed as a raptorial bird.

"This representation and the sun symbol on his chest are typical of the SCC, and the stone no doubt dates to the same time as the mounds," Brown said. He added that Kevin Smith in the Department of Anthropology at Middle Tennessee State University has conducted field school excavations at the Castalian Springs site the past two summers.

A slab found at the Arnold site in Brentwood in the early-middle 1960s was the third such stone found and the last before the subject of Brown's search.
Two more were found later along the Cumberland River in east Nashville in 1975.

To archaeologists and historians, the stones are valuable for "what they can tell us about the technology, social organization and belief systems of the original Middle Tennesseans who lived here before we Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans arrived," Brown said.

Composed of two million blocks of stone, each weighing more than two tonnes, this was not erected by George Wimpey and Co in a fortnight. For approximately 43 centuries it was the world's tallest man-made structure.

Or so we thought. Reports are emerging from Bosnia-Herzegovina of structures that make the pyramid of Giza look like a scale model (see http://www.bosnianpyramids.org/, http://www.bosnianpyramid.com/, and http://www.bosnian-pyramid.com/).

At 267 metres tall, the Pyramid of the Sun blows the Egyptian opposition into the weeds. If that wasn't enough, it is simply one of a number of pyramids located in the same region - there are also the Pyramids of the Sun, the Dragon and, most recently discovered, Love.

These revelations are not simply about who has the biggest bragging rights for historic civil engineering projects. Structures like these take colossal man power to create - estimates for a single Egyptian pyramid run into tens of millions of man hours.

Such a workforce means, in turn, huge logistical organisation - land cultivation, food transport, housing, water, waste disposal etc. The simple existence of these gigantic man-made structures in Europe means the entire history of the development of human civilization will have to be rewritten with Bosnia-Herzegovina at its centre.

All of which appears to be just fine by Semir Osmanagi? who is at the centre of these discoveries. He is referred to on bosnianpyramid.com as "Bosnia's Indiana Jones" which is either a reference to the hat and boots that he affects or his extraordinary archaeological discoveries. Not a man who appears to eschew modesty, he is quoted as saying: "My discovery will change human history".

As might be imagined, this is a very big deal in Bosnia-Herzegovina where it forms the focus of a nightly reality TV show. We strongly recommend that you visit the web sites and that you examine the other evidence that is accumulating daily on the web, such as this video, where you can see, and weigh, for yourself the evidence that this is a man-made structure.

Of course, the cynical sceptics amongst you may feel that claims like these are so fantastic as to be unbelievable, but that is not the case. We believe the reason the claims are unbelievable is more simple; they are wrong.

How can we be so sure? We have been talking to Professor John Parker of Cambridge University, the director of the Botanic Garden and also Professor of Botany at St Catharine's College. He's actually travelled there and seen the evidence first hand.

El Reg: How did you come to visit the site?

Professor Parker: I visited the site in August this year as part of a visit to Sarajevo with one of the professors there. My colleague in Sarajevo invited me to come and see this phenomenon so we made our way to the site and climbed to the top of one of the hills which was being referred to as the Pyramid of the Sun. As we climbed the hill we passed, as you would expect, Nefertiti's café and stalls selling little models of the pyramids. I must admit I began to wonder where we were.

The top of the hill was being cleared and they were digging away the surface to the depth of about a metre, exposing what looked for all the world like concrete spilling down the slopes of the hill. These inclined, flat sheets consisted of aggregate in a matrix and I gathered that these were being put forward as a man-made phenomenon. It was quite impressive: large slabs, some of them up to 50 or 60 metres long. It was explained to me as man-made concrete that had been cast as slabs with shuttering between them. This is exactly the way in which, today, we cover large areas with concrete. We use shuttering to limit the size of the slabs and the spaces left when the shuttering is removed allow for expansion.

So, having seen that, we went across the valley to the Pyramid of the Moon, a slightly lower hill, and again we went through a mass of little stalls selling this time, Mayan step pyramid models.

In contrast to the Pyramid of the Sun, where the slabs of concrete lie parallel to the side of the hill, the material that makes up the Pyramid of the Moon lies in horizontal sheets. The flat sheets of exposed material have a sort of ripple effect on the top and the whole surface broken by regular lines into what looks like crazy paving with most of the fracture lines of the crazy paving roughly parallel to each other. It is broken up into rough rectangular blocks but laid so closely together that they look just as if they have been laid by human hand.

El Reg: But you weren't convinced?

Professor Parker: Well, no, because I'd seen this kind of thing before. It is a perfect example of a fossilised beach, essentially little mud ripples on a beach which then becomes fossilised. What they were doing was cutting into the hillside to expose this beautiful raised beach.

As you looked at the profile that they had cut you saw the layers above it and every time they came to a slightly harder layer that showed that phenomenon, so they exposed it back. They were cutting the side of the hill into a series of steps, each one about a metre and a half or two meters. Hence the Pyramid of the Moon is described a stepped pyramid, as opposed to the Pyramid of the Sun where the sides are flat.

El Reg: So, what about the "concrete" on the Pyramid of the Sun?

Professor Parker: It is a natural material. When you looked at the whole site there was a very turbulent river which came down (and they are really turbulent in Bosnia) which had cut a deep valley through the mainly limestone area in which we found ourselves. However, the river rises in the mountains to the West which are mainly acidic. So the "concrete" is made of the embedded stones that were washed down from the acidic mountains deposited in an alkaline substrate.

El Reg: What about the marks of the shuttering?

Professor Parker: As the conglomerate formed and then subsequently cracked, the cracks were filled in with calcite which would be crystallised from the calcium carbonate and dolomite which makes up the matrix. If you looked at the cracks between the slabs carefully - and this is what told me straight away that it was natural - you could see that individual stones that were embedded in the matrix were shattered through.

In other words, you regularly find single stones, embedded in two slabs, cut neatly through by the "shuttering" lines. It seems highly unlikely that human beings would split stones and place the two halves neatly on either side of a piece of shuttering. But natural cracks will run through both the stones and the matrix. So the cracks are clearly a post-construction phenomenon, not a pre-construction one.

El Reg: Ok, that explains the materials found on the two hills, but how did it get there in the first place?

Professor Parker: Remember that turbulent river. You've got the aggregate which came from the acidic mountains and it came down into a calcareous lake where the big stones had settled out with the calcareous substrate to make the aggregate on one side of the valley. That explains the "concrete". On the other side of the valley the mud was left and was depositing out as beaches which were obviously a drying lake surface and I should think alternately wetting and drying. It was quite obvious that it was part of one kind of system, probably a delta type system.

Geologically it was absolutely fascinating. I've never seen a better example of this. At the same time one of my colleagues, Dr Mary Edmunds, found the most perfect fossils in the material they'd excavated on the Pyramid of the Moon. They were simply beautiful - you broke open every piece of this supposedly man-made material and inside were things like pine seeds perfectly preserved with their wings so you could even identify the species of pine - Pinus nigra that grows there still - and also birch leaves: it was full of just wonderful sub-fossil material. That alone told us that it was clearly a post-glacial phenomenon, relatively recent - less than 12,000 years old.
El Reg: So, if the "concrete" is natural, and formed in a lake, why is it now at such an angle, forming the sloping sides of a hill?

Professor Parker: The way I was thinking about the conglomerate - why it looked like a triangle - was that if you think about the river constantly undermining soft substrate with a hard crust it becomes rather like a crème brulée. As soon as you take away the cream from below there's nothing to hold the upper material and it will collapse, and of course it will tend to shatter, if it is a flat plate, into triangular slabs. I think what you'd got is this material shattered into one of these triangular slabs which gives you the triangular shape and when you excavate it of course the conglomerate is now facing down the hill.

El Reg: So, the site is worthless?

Professor Parker: Absolutely not. I spent considerable time looking at the fossils because I've never seen any so good from a post-glacial site. It's very sad because you could have got the most detailed and intimate knowledge of the changes in vegetation patterns from the post-glacial era. It is so clearly a natural phenomenon that it should be investigated as a natural phenomenon rather than being shrouded in all this magic and mystery.

I am worried about it because the Bosnian people deserve better than this. They are a wonderful people who have suffered so much. In this site they have a fabulous natural phenomenon and the danger is that the people and the country could become a laughing stock if the site continues to be interpreted in this way.