Earlier these 3 tahana glyphs have been rather convincingly 'proven' to be related:
Above, though, the pair of 'atariki' glyphs provides a more complex picture. Ha7-40 clearly identifies the location as one of 'end station'. 384 (= 2 * 192 = 12 * 32) is one of the measures of the length of a year. Counting days instead of glyphs we find 384 / 3 = 128 (= 4 * 32), of course. But not of course is 186 = 128 + 58 (counted from mago mea ke at Hb9-63), which is equal to 366 - 180. The glyphs which surround Ha7-40 show how the first half of the year is ending:
With help from the 58 'incredibly dark nights' (from mago mea ke) the creator of the text (or some earlier genius) has accomplished the feat of coordinating glyph number 366 (counted from Ha1-1) with day number 180. And other such gems surely also are embedded in the text, e.g. is manu kake with number 400 located at the beginning of day 192 (and Ha8-5 of course alludes to 8 * 5 = 10). As to 'atariki' in Ha3-51 it could well be that he is the 3rd member in a triplet of glyphs with similar meaning:
They could all stand at the end of some kind of year - we know there were several measures of the length of a year. We cannot, however, in this dictionary make explicit the meaning of everything. It is enough to notice there are 13 glyphs and 5 days, and that also the other numbers are odd - a bad sign (signifying darkness and death). |