From the Riddles of Ancient Egypt to Cryptography in the Renaissance — 3500 Years in the Making - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 20

have to be turned upside down every time a line was read. Experts speculate
that the tablets were used by priests for purposes of worship, so they are of-
ten called sacred tablets. However, nobody really knows. Only some thirty or
so tablet fragments remain, so as with the Phaistos disk with which we began
this section, there is not enough data to make a definitive analysis of the script.
Thus, as with the Mayan mysteries, rongorongo remains one of the few languages
left that have not been deciphered. Some images of rongorongo inscriptions are
given in Figures 1.12 and 1.13. Figure 1.12 is a portion of a rongorongo tablet.
Figure 1.13 is the Santiago Staff , a walking stick. It was was obtained, in 1870,
from the French colonist Dutrou-Bornier. He maintained that it had belonged
to an ariki or king . It is entirely covered with rongorongo signs, inscribed along
its length.
Figure 1.11 is an image of one of the roughly 600 giant stone busts
that pepper the island. Although they were initially objects of wor-
ship by the inhabitants, when Captain James Cook reached the island in
1774, he found that most of them had been deliberately knocked over.

The population had been reduced from
3000 people to roughly 600 men and little
more than a couple dozen women. Os-
tensibly a civil war had taken its toll
on the aborigines there. Although the
population again reached 3000 by 1860,
a Peruvian-launched slave trade, coupled
with smallpox, nearly annihilated the
population, so that by 1877, there were
only 111 inhabitants left. The popula-
tion again increased by the end of the
nineteenth century. In 1888, Chile an-
nexed Easter Island, and turned it into
a sheep-raising community. In 1965, the
islanders became Chilean citizens, main-
taining their culture and ancestral aGlia-
tions. In fact, each February the inhabi-
tants meet for celebrations of the island's
past with a revival of old skills and cus-
toms.
Given the fact that antiquity refers to
times up to the Middle Ages and we have
covered both the Old and New worlds,
this is an appropriate juncture at which
to conclude this section. We have only barely scratched the surface of the history
of antiquity as it applies to cryptography, but the reader will have a suGcient
sense of our past to carry forward.

Figure 1.11: Easter Island Moais.