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3. During the first years much of my time was spent in 'cutting out' every glyph from its context and giving each such little picture a 'label' defining from where it had come. For example:
The first letter identifies the text from which the glyph originates (here G = Small Santiago Tablet), next comes a or b depending on side (front respectively back) of the tablet. Then there is a number referring to the ordinal number of the text line on that side, and finally comes the ordinal number in the line. I have cut out the glyphs from Steven Roger Fischer's exceptionally good pictures of the texts in his monograph Rongorongo. The Easter Island Script. History, Traditions, Texts. His pictures are computer-drawn and based on the original tablets (with just a few exceptions). Without this quality the decoding would have been much more difficult. Not only is the precision outstanding but the inevitable bias of a human hand (or rather mind) is avoided. Perception is a subjective process.
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