Rongo-Rongo
An indecipherable written language preserved by the natives of Easter Island, in the eastern Pacific Ocean, on wooden tablets known as kohau. Most of the thousands of such tablets were burned by Christian missionaries, but very few surviving specimens are virtually identical to the no less mysterious Indus Valley script from nearly 13,000 miles away, precisely half-way around the globe. In between India and Easter Island, rongo-rongo appears only in rarely isolated characters among the Gilbert and other scattered Pacific islands. Comparison between the two syllabaries is less complicated by the great distances dividing them than by their broad separation in time. The Indus Valley script was in use by the late fourth millennium b.c., dying out with the Aryan invasions of 1500 b.c., while the kohau have not been dated earlier than the fifth century a.d. These are apparently copies made of earlier “talking boards.”
Variations on the name “Rongo” are associated throughout Polynesia with a fair-haired flood hero from a sunken kingdom. The culture-bearer, Hotu Matua, was said to have brought a library of 67 kohau to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, from Marae-Renga, an island satellite of the larger kingdom, Hiva, which sank beneath the sea. His “talking boards” were alleged to have included histories, proverbs, songs, and genealogical tables. Because traditions in both India and Easter Island describe arrivals of culture-bearers from a high civilization destroyed by a natural catastrophe, the written languages unique to either location are probably legacies from the sunken land of Mu. No other conclusion better explains the close resemblance of these two written languages otherwise parted by thousands of miles and several millennia.
Root race
An Anthroposophical term for an ancestral race of modern man. The Atlantean is one of several such races. (See Steiner)
Rudbeck, Olaus
Living from 1630 to 1702 , Olaus Rudbeck was a Swedish scientific genius, Professor of Medicine (Uppsala), discoverer of the lymphatic system at just 22 years of age, inventor of the anatomical theater dome, designer of the first university gardens, initiator of Latin as the lingua franca of the scientific world community, astronomer, architect, shipyard builder, musician, historian of early Sweden, and on and on. Rudbeck’s ambition to create a life-size woodcut of every plant known to botany resulted in more than 7,000 carved images. He financed and personally led the first professional expedition beyond the Arctic Circle to bring back numerous plant and animal specimens previously unknown to science. A brilliant scholar fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Rudbeck possessed a grasp of classical literature nothing less than encyclopedic.
Combining his vast knowledge of the ancient world with personal archaeological research in his own country, he concluded during a long period of investigation (1651 to 1698), that Atlantis was fact—not fiction—and the greatest civilization in prehistory. From 1679 until shortly before his death 23 years later, he composed Atlantica, published in a bilingual Latin-Swedish edition. According to the four-volume work, Norse myths and some physical evidence among his country’s mega-lithic ruins show how a relatively few Atlantean survivors may have impacted Sweden, contributing to its cultural development, and laid the foundations, particularly in ship construction, for what would much later become the “Viking Age” from the ninth to 12th centuries a.d.
Although Atlantologists have since dismissed Rudbeck’s chauvinist belief that Sweden and Atlantis were synonymous, the main thesis of Atlantica—that Scandinavia was among the first lands occupied by Atlantean survivors—continues to persuade through the vast amount of still-valid cultural evidence he marshalled on behalf of his argument. He identified some Atlanteans with the biblical tribe of Magog, whose members migrated after the catastrophe far across the Black Sea, following Russian rivers to the Kimi districts in northern Finland, moving on to the plain around Uppsala in the middle of what would much later become Sweden. “Magog” features the “og” associated with Atlantis in several ancient Old World cultures: the Bronze Age British Gogmagog, the Celtic Ogimos, the Old Irish Ogma and Tir-nan-Og, the Greek Ogyges, and so on.
Rudbeck’s tracing of Atlantean influences appeared to have been verified more than 250 years later, during the early 1960s, when Swedish archaeologists identified Scandinavia’s earliest known Bronze Age site in digs at Uppsala. Radiocarbon testing revealed a habitation date circa 2200 b.c. The Swedish savant had stated that the Atlanteans arrived at Uppsala around 2400 b.c. This time parameter is particularly significant, because it has been identified with the second Atlantean flood, brought about by the near-miss of a debris-laden comet in 2193 b.c.
Rudbeck’s Atlanto-Nordic researches were taken up by another 18th-century scholar, the French astronomer Jean Bailey, who concluded that Spitzbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, was all that remained of Atlantis. Bailey was a victim of the French Revolution.
It says something for the credibility of Atlantis that many of the most eminent thinkers in the history of Western Civilization—Solon, Plato, Strabo, Plutarch, Bacon, Kircher, Muck, Blake, Rudbeck, etc.—have been among its most prominent advocates.
Rutas
Another name for Mu or Lemuria found among a few scattered Polynesian tales, mentioned by some Brahman traditions and in Beon-Buddhist monastery records of Tibet. “Rutas” may have derived from Rudra, the “Cosmic Fire,” or life-energy and title of Murrugan, one of Lemuria’s chief deities, described in an Indian purana, the Shrimad Bhagavatam. Like Mu, Rutas was supposed to have been a very large island located in the eastern Pacific, where dwelt a race of spiritually advanced sun-worshippers before their land was destroyed by a terrific flood. Survivors arriving in India established what eventually became the elite Brahman caste.
Ruty
An epitaph meaning a “pair of lions.” They are represented in temple art facing away from each other, their tails opposed, while Shu, the Egyptian Atlas, appears in between them, thus defining Atlantis as the sacred center, the Navel of the World. “Ruty” would also appear to have a philological relationship with “Rutas,” one of the names or titles of Lemuria. Such a connection would be appropriate, because the two civilizations shared some fundamental spiritual beliefs. Indeed, the Navel of the World appears at two important cult centers in the Pacific during post-Lemurian times; namely, Easter Island as Rapa-nui, and Hawaii’s “Navel of Kane,” the creator-god. Ruty’s twin lions might have even signified the two sunken civilizations, Atlantis and Lemuria, which both shared a related spirituality.
