The creator of the text could not be certain that his collage of signs in Ca2-1 would be enough to enable his reader to understand. In modern telecommunications there is always a risk the receiver will get a garbled message and the technique to overcome this obstacle is redundancy - to send more than one message so that it will be certain that at least one of them will be correctly received at the other end. So the creator of the glyph text had to do something similar, give the same message more than once. The number of glyphs in line Ca1 is 26. This number was like number 8 loaded with meanings. For instance does it combine with 71 (the number of years for the precession to move the stars ahead in the year with one day). Anciently it was known that the precessional cycle was 26,000 years and I have used this number in order to find 71 as the number of years to work with in presenting 'the First Point in Aries' as it was back in time. 26,000 / 365¼ = ca 71 26 glyphs in line Ca1 could therefore be a cue for the reader that the text was to be placed in the cosmological category. 26 could be 'read' as short for 26,000 years and the beginning of side a could be similar to the 'very beginning of time'. However, this is surely no proof of my proposed interpretation. It takes much more. The number of glyphs on side b of the tablet is 348 and its last line Cb14 has 19 glyphs.
I have discovered that these 19 glyphs probably should be subdivided into 11 + 8. The total number of glyphs on the tablet is 740 and this equals 2 * 366 + 8. The solar calendar year used by the rongorongo writers was not 365 days - which would have been wrong because the true year is approximately 365¼ days. Instead they probably used a calendar with 366 days ('nights'). There are 8 ('octopus') glyphs which are exposed to the reader as a Sign at the end of side b:
After 2 * 366 = 732 glyphs (days) the text returns to its beginning at the March equinox. This time, however, March 21 is represented by a glyph (Cb14-11) and I have assigned its day number as 81 instead of 80 because the month corresponding to our February (if there was such a month) carried not 28 but 29 days (like in one of our leap years). |