1. This type of glyph probably indicates the king.

Mummies of pharaohs have their arms crosswise over their chests according to a TV program I happened to watch.

The Inca kingdom was called Tawantinsuyu = 'the indivisible four quarters of the world' and the Inca himself was ruling in its center (Cuzco). (The Two Worlds of Peru)

The Ariki is like the Pharaoh and the Inca, rulers at the top of a pyramid, close to the gods in the sky. They unite the four quarters by being at the immovable center in a high position, in the 5th corner of the pyramid.

"The French Admiral de Lapelin was the first to mention that, 'Gaara or Gabara' taught the reading and writing of the 'talking boards'. This was the famous Nga'ara of the Miru († c. 1859), the 'ariki mau or paramount chief of Easter Island and most famous rongorongo expert who ever lived.

Nga'ara plays the central figure in the drama of rongorongo on premissionary Easter Island. This is because, at the point of minimum regard for an 'ariki mau, Nga'ara brilliantly exploited from his seat at 'Anakena the sacral prerogative of the rongorongo - which ostensibly had been elaborated only for sacred purposes two generations earlier - to render it an expression of the royal mandate as well, hereby profiting from the mana-imbued phenomenon while simultaneously expanding its social domain. (It is doubtful whether, before Nga'ara, the rongorongo constituted a franchise of Rapanui's 'ariki mau.) Nga'ara's reign, extending from c. 1835 up to c. 1859, embraced the Golden Age of rongorongo. Almost immediately after Nga'ara's death, beginning in 1862-63, came the labour raids, the pandemics, the destruction and concealment of the rongorongo artefacts, and the wholesale collapse of Rapanui society.

Nga'ara´s father was Easter Island's 'ariki mau Kai Mako'i, after whom Nga'ara named his son and successor: Kai Mako'i 'Iti ('Junior'). From Juan Tepano's ancient grandmother Veri  'Amo we know that Nga'ara was 'very fat + did nothing - wrote rong o rongs - much tatooed so he looked black'. Joanne Vieko (born c. 1850) recalled that Nga'ara was 'a very big man, not tall but fat'." (Fischer)

3. The ariki is the king who is close by, not the king in the sky (Sun) and not the king in the dark underworld (Saturn). In the calendar of the week we find 'the king' in Thursday and there he is Jupiter, the god of thunder and lightning. Jupiter means 'father light', i.e. he reflects the 'light' (orders) given by the higher powers (the stars and Saturn).

'... Based upon the fact that toko in New Zealand also means 'rays of light', it has been suggested that the original props which separated and held apart Sky and Earth were conceived of as shafts of dawn sunlight. 

In most Polynesian languages the human and animate classifier is toko-, suggesting a congruence of semantic and symbolic meaning between anthropomorphic form and pole or post. Tane as First Man and the embodiment of sunlight thus becomes, in the form of a carved human male figure, the probable inspiration for the moai as sacred prop between Sky and Earth.

The moai as Sky Propper would have elevated Sky and held it separate from Earth, balancing it only upon his sacred head. This action allowed the light to enter the world and made the land fertile.

Increasing the height of the statues, as the Rapa Nui clearly did over time, would symbolically increase the space between Sky and Earth, ensuring increased fertility and the greater production of food. The proliferating image, consciously or unconsciously, must have visually (and reassuringly) filled the dangerously empty horizon between sea and land, just as the trees they were so inexorably felling once had.' (Van Tilburg)

To this I would like to add that these moai statues ('living images of the past') are individualized, they are not stereotypes. Each one of them presumably represents an ariki (though not necessarily the chief king, ariki mau). Several tribes warred which each other in later centuries and each certainly must have had some kind of a king of their own. Nearly every moai statue had their back to the sea and were overlooking a piece of land.