TRANSLATIONS
If - as I guess - the backside (b) of Tahua contains something else than a description of the solar year - then what? Possibly the lunar cycle. Light (GD41, hau tea) is seen also in the night, that was made clear in the weekly calendar of Large Santiago Tablet where hau tea presumably indicates the light from the moon: Of all the variously designed GD41 on side b of Tahua the first glyph (Ab1-3) resembles the moon light most:
On side a we guessed that a short right vertical line meant 'waning' (past summer solstice), Aa5-5 and Aa5-63:
Consequently we ought to interpret black above as having a similar meaning - possibly waning moon. In Aa5-63 the little gap at left between 'the roof ' and the left vertical line is very small - as if the gap was closing. On side b all hau tea have closed 'roofs'. We should also notice - en passant - that Aa1-10, the en face person, allows us to see a little gap at left:
Aa1-10 we have tentatively identified as 'parallel in time-space' with Aa5-63. The double 'suns' in Aa7-79 (perhaps alluding to rising Matariki) has an extraordinary long central line, but on side b we find that Ab4-49 on the contrary has a short vertical line, a trait which also Ab8-53 exhibits:
Possibly Ab4-49 indicates where a new season is succeeding an old season. A complete cycle seems to be shown in the double 'suns' and number 8. 7 glyphs (double-nights?) further on we find Ab8-53, at a location corresponding to new moon. The fading light glyphs (black above) tell us that. Moon has two main phases: waxing and waning, whereas sun has just one season (during the rest of the year he is absent). The short middle vertical line maybe indicates a weakness - at 8 the old moon dies and at 15 the new moon is being born. The 'up-in-the-air' glyphs Ab3-46 and Ab3-53 resemble the Keiti week hau tea in Tuesday - Thursday:
No gap between 'roof' and left vertical line is seen in these 7 hau tea. The 'planets' are seen only in the night. According to the Mamari moon calendar we can also see the sign 'up-in-the-air', though in another 'idiom' (Ca7-19 and Ca8-6):
The moon is here - in the 4th respectively 7th period - far from the horizon, flying above the back of what may be the sleeping sun (presumably the moon is observed during the night). According to Barthel 2 and manuscript E the expedition of Ira and company toured the island in a direction opposite to that of the dream soul of Hau Maka, who moved counterclockwise - as when sun moves from east to west from a viewpoint south of the equator looking north. Moon moves in the opposite direction, rising in the west and descending in the east, therefore the tour of Ira and company should allude to the movement of the moon. It seems that in reading the backside (b) of Tahua the movement mirrors the reading of the front side (a):
The gash at line a2 is on the backside located at b7, i.e. reading on side a the gash is soon encountered, while reading on side b the gash is encountered late. This fact reminds me about the alternating odd and even glyph numbers on side a of Aruku Kurenga: Odd number lines are encountered when reading one way and after having turned the tablet halfway around even number lines are to be read. A tablet, possibly, should be understood as an image (map) of Easter Island, which in turn may be regarded as an image of the sky where sun and moon and planets move in a more or less regular fashion. As I remember it, Tahua is one of the latest rongorongo tablets and Mamari one of the oldest remaining tablets. Possibly the idea of writing about the solar year on one side (a) and the lunar ‘year’ (month) on the opposite side (b) was a late idea, which did not exist when Mamari was created. That would explain why we find 360 on Mamari but 314 on Tahua: A full cycle can be expressed with 360 if only one cycle, the solar, is in mind. With the intention to write about two different cycles, 314 is a more general and useful concept. The moon calendar has sun picture glyphs in the middle of all 8 periods. |