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Fischer vs Englert
In his 1997 "Rongorongo, the Easter Island Script"
(Oxford University Press),
Steven Fischer writes of Father Sebastian Englert:
(p.181) "All the more reason, then, to be
surprised and dismayed that the German Capuchin father
[Englert] distilled a yarn
as far removed from the historical truth of rongorongo's erstwhile use
as one
can imagine. For if Englert genuflected to any dogma it was to that of
the almighty Oral Tradition"
(p.183)
"Even in his posthumously
published Island at the Centre of the World - New Light on Easter Island
(Englert, 1970: 73-81) - regarded today on the island, in the Spanish
edition, as "Scripture" - Padre Sebastian only reiterated the
superannuated posture toward rongorongo of the 1930s and confused its
scientific discussion with sophomoric inaccuracies."
And he concludes, p.183: "Sadly to say, Padre Sebastian
was essentially an unqualified amateur who based all
his conclusions on recent Rapanui oral traditions. When
a trained scientist [Fischer] in search of the truth
behind rongorongo finds the legendary Padre Sebastian -
"the uncrowned king of Easter Island" - constantly
quoted in Rapanui literature as an "authority" in this
regard, it smarts."
What did Englert precisely write to incur Fischer's
wrath and exasperation? Read, in Englert's
1970 posthumous book, the very pages mentioned by Fischer:
| What Englert wrote |
What Fischer says |
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p.74: According to the tradition, Hotu
Matu'a brought with him from Hiva sixty-seven of these
inscribed tablets.
|
p.181: In his short history of the script Padre Sebastian tells
of Eyraud and how the tablets had arrived with Hotu Matu'a, a recent
myth that Padre Sebastian accepted as historical fact.
|
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pp.74-75:
The sequence of the writing is a rare and curious one
called "reversed boustrophedon" - that is, each line of
script when it reaches the edge of the board turns back
upside down to form the next line. This means that to
read the script one must turn the board around at the
end of each line.
|
p.181:
His claim that the
inscriptions were read alternately left to right and right to left,
without mentioning boustrophedon or the need to rotate the artefact
while reading, shows in fact just how limited his knowledge of the
subject was.
|
|
p.79: A Hungarian scholar, Guillaume de Hevesy, in 1932
called attention to apparent similarities between some
of the ko hau rongorongo characters and some of the
characters in a script discovered in a 3000-year-old
civilization in the Indus Valley. The publication was
initially regarded as an important discovery with the
implication that the people of Hotu Matu'a might have
originated in that part of India. Specialists today are
inclined to the opinion that the similarities are not
close or frequent enough to suggest any contact between
these two cultures so separated in space and time. They
are more likely to be the sort of similarities that
often exist between objects of independent origin in
cultures which have no historical relationships.
|
pp.181-182: He personally felt that de
Hevesy's "discovery" might indicate either that there were connections, however indirect,
with the Indus Valley or that the Polynesians had perchance learnt a graphic system from
some South Asian people.
|
|
pp.79-80:
The most complete work dealing with the problem up to
the present time is Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der
Osterinselschrift (Foundations for the Decipherment of
the Easter Island Script) by Thomas Barthel, professor
of ethnology at the University of Tübingen. He has
presented detailed descriptions and photographs of all
the tablets known, a complete enumeration of the
characters and the location of each in the lines of the
tablets, the texts of the recitations made by Metoro
for Bishop Jaussen, and a commentary on the objects
represented in the characters. This voluminous work is
a true Corpus Inscriptionum Paschalis Insulae,
but the translations it provides are not very
intelligible. A group
of Russian scholars, including J.V. Knorozov, I.K.
Fedorova, and A.M. Kondratov, have spent some years studying
the problem from a point of view rather different from
that of Barthel. They too have not yet succeeded in
producing a satisfactory translation.
|
p.183:
And in
his discussions he included only those investigators who principally
expressed pessimism toward a solution of the rongorongo question,
ignoring in later years all scientific advances made by Thomas Barthel
or the Russians, despite documented access to this material.
|
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p.80: Our understanding of the old language of Easter
Island, which the script undoubtedly represents, is by
no means complete
|
p.183: Padre Sebastian never undertook an internal analysis of
the script, which he always doubted was a script.
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