The rongorongo script of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is a unique writing system developed in Polynesia. The oral traditions of the islanders « assert that Hotu-Matua, the first king, possessed the knowledge of this written language, and brought with him to the island sixty-seven tablets containing allegories, traditions, genealogical tables and proverbs relating to the land from which he had migrated » (Thomson, 1891: 514). However, the search of possible trans-insular origins of the script did not reveal any results supporting the external origin of the script. At the same time, the iconography of rongorongo signs pronouncedly matches the Rapa Nui petroglyphs (Fedorova, 1983: 45, fig. 2; Lee, 1992: 126-128; Macri, 1996: 184, fig. 19; Horley and Lee, 2008: 114, fig. 6), providing the evidence to Easter Island development of the script.
The existence of inscribed objects was first witnessed in 1864 by the first Rapa Nui missionary Eugène Eyraud (Fischer 1997: 12), but it was Tepano Jauss...