TRANSLATIONS

TRANSLATIONS

The vanished glyph with ordinal number 150 (*Kb5-11) possibly never was incised on the tablet. I am influenced by a missing glyph on E, which presumably never was incised on the tablet, but would have had ordinal number 261 = 9 * 29 if it had been so:


Ea7-38	Ea7-39	Ea8-1	Ea8-2
		?
Ea8-3	Ea8-4	?	*Ea8-5

29 signifies the end of the month and 150 can be understood as the end of 6 * 25 days in the sun. Another 'never there' glyph is *Hb8-16:

	...
Hb8-15	*Hb8-16	*Hb8-17	*Hb8-18	*Hb8-19	*Hb8-20	*Hb8-21

But I must take it in its proper order. Next page in the glyph dictionary is the beginning of the story of the possibly missing glyph in E:

The E calendar (Eb1-37--Eb6-19) has no viri glyphs, and in the rest of the text of E there is only one viri glyph without additional signs:

19
	*Ea8-24	*Ea8-25	*Ea8-26	*Ea8-27

	*Ea8-28	*Ea8-29	*Ea8-30	*Ea8-31

The pair of glyphs to the right of viri indicate the end of period 19 (out of 20) - and we once again notice 19 as a possible sign for the final of the sun. (Cfr also Eb6-19 as the end glyph of a calendar.)

The reconstructed ordinal number 29 for the viri glyph in line Ea8 may be wrong. Ea8 is the only line in the text of E which causes trouble when counting glyphs, maybe intentionally so by its creator.

*Ea8-25 has 6 + 6 'fire feathers' and the ordinal number is 25 = 5 * 5. In contrast *Ea8-29 probably indicates the opposite: utter darkness. The arrangement in 4 + 4 glyphs is obvious - people showing hands and feet in the 1st position and 'sleepy old birds' in the 3rd position.

Then follows a series of pages from the link 'line Ea8' and this is the first one:

I have counted the glyphs of Keiti earlier and found the number of glyphs on side a to be equal to the number on side b, and - remarkably - 314 ( = 100π).

However, although the total is 628 (twice 314) there are only 302 glyphs on side b. On side a there are 326 glyphs. Somewhere I must have made a mistake in thinking there were an equal number of glyphs on the sides. I now will retrace my steps to see what happened. Possibly I first noticed 628 when I constructed a preliminary table for the structure of the E text:

Partition	Subject	Distinctions	Number of glyphs
1	Introduction to moon calendar (?)	Glyphs similar to those in the moon calendar	7
2	Moon calendar (?)	*9 sequences of similar glyphs starting with a standing person holding toki* and ending with three characteristic glyph types**	99
3	?	20 - 9 = 11 glyph sequences with various glyphs ending with the last two of the three characteristic glyph types	208 (?)
4	Introduction to calendar for the year (?)	Various glyphs	48
5	Calendar for the year (?)	24 glyph sequences ending with a characteristic glyph type	167
6	?	Various glyphs	99
Total number of glyphs			628

99 glyphs were specified like this:

Period no.	Number of glyphs
1	8
2	8
3	9
4	12
5	11
6	10
7	11
8	18
9	12
Total number of glyphs	99

So far so good. It can be argued that the total number should be 106 (by including the first 7 glyphs in the text), but that is no great question.

99 probably is correct, cfr for instance the 99 glyphs from the 2nd Rei (Ka3-15) up to and including viri at Kb4-7. Also, 99 is a number connecting to the cycle of Venus:

"After five complete cycles totaling 2,920 days, the movement of Venus fill eight idealized years of 365 days each and come within hours of spanning 99 lunations." (Popol Vuh)

2,920 / 99 = 29.49 and a synodic month is 29.53 days.

I must change a page at hetuu in the dictionary. This is how the text looks before the change:

4. The circuit of the sun around a 'year' (i.e. half-year) can be pictured as a circle, which at the same time then easily can be used to allude to the disc of the sun.

A circle is measured by its radius (or by its diameter). The circumference of the circle has a length equal to its diameter times π.

Counting glyphs in the text of E (Keiti) I stumbled on the fact that both of its sides have 314 glyphs, a number which I interpreted as 100π. Not many rongorongo tablets have all their glyphs still intact, but I could continue by identifying what seems to be the same number symbolism also in the texts of A and H:

Keiti (E)			Large Santiago (H)			Tahua (A)
side a	314	100π	side a	*648	200π+20	side a	670	200π+42
side b	314	100π	side b	*648	200π+20	side b	664	200π+36
sum	628	200π	sum	*1296	400π+40	sum	1334	400π+78
Numbers with asterisk (*) mean that the numbers result from a painstaking and time-consuming process to recreate the number of missing glyphs in those parts of the text which have been destroyed.

However, it is not absolutely certain that the intention of the creators of these texts was (just) to document the numeric value of π.

I will now change it into:

4. The circuit of the sun around a 'year' (i.e. half-year) can be pictured as a circle, which at the same time then easily can be used to allude to the disc of the sun.

A circle is measured by its radius (or by its diameter). The circumference of the circle has a length equal to its diameter times π.

Counting glyphs in the text of E (Keiti) I reached 314, a number which I interpreted as 100π. Not many rongorongo tablets have all their glyphs still intact, but I could continue by identifying what seems to be the same number symbolism also in the texts of A and H:

Keiti (E)			Large Santiago (H)			Tahua (A)
side a	314	100π	side a	*648	200π+20	side a	670	200π+42
side b	314	100π	side b	*648	200π+20	side b	664	200π+36
sum	628	200π	sum	*1296	400π+40	sum	1334	400π+78
Numbers with asterisk (*) mean that the numbers result from a painstaking and time-consuming process to recreate the number of missing glyphs in those parts of the text which have been destroyed.

However, it is not absolutely certain that the intention of the creators of these texts was (just) to document the numeric value of π. Furthermore, checking the numbers I discovered I had made a mistake: Although there are 628 glyphs in E there are 326 on side a and 302 on side b.

I need to make more corrections, though, because I have used the table with π numbers later in the dictionary too. At tagata there is a similar incorrect table:

My curiousity had been raised by the number of glyphs in the Tahua tablet:

Tahua (A)			Keiti (E)			Large Santiago (H)
side a	670	200π+42	side a	314	100π	side a	*648	200π+20
side b	664	200π+36	side b	314	100π	side b	*648	200π+20
sum	1334	400π+78	sum	628	200π	sum	*1296	400π+40

Zero was once not necessary to write down. It could be understood anyhow that for example 36 probably meant 36 decades = 360 (i.e. the number of days in a rationally defined calendar for the year, with 5¼ days left out for practical or other reasons).

I concluded that 42 (redmarked above) meant 420, but what period was that?

I will now change it into:

Tahua (A)			Keiti (E)			Large Santiago (H)
side a	670	200π+42	side a	326	100π+12	side a	*648	200π+20
side b	664	200π+36	side b	302	100π-12	side b	*648	200π+20
sum	1334	400π+78	sum	628	200π	sum	*1296	400π+40

Then, at vaha mea, yet another table which I now change into:

Keiti (E)			Large Santiago (H)			Tahua (A)
side a	326	100π+12	side a	*648	200π+20	side a	670	200π+42
side b	302	100π-12	side b	*648	200π+20	side b	664	200π+36
sum	628	200π	sum	*1296	400π+40	sum	1334	400π+78

I have also changed the corresponding pages in the Glyph Dictionary document. I am not, however, going to change in the Translations document - it would be too much work. The glyph dictionary is more important and therefore the Glyph Dictionary document must be correct.

The Index document certainly also contains 314 instead of 326 etc, but I will not change in that document either.