Tamil roots to Easter Island. A myth or reality?

Tamil roots to Easter Island. A myth or reality?

Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island inthe southeastern Pacific Ocean. Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people between 1100 and 1680 CE.

The Rapanui also boasted a pictographic script named Rongorongo. In 1932, a Hungarian by the name of Vilmos Hevesy created a sensation by claiming that Rongorongo was related to the Indus Valley script. The Indus script is incidentally also linked by some Dravidian historians to Tamil. They consequently also believe that Rongorongo is related to Tamil which therefore implies the presence/migration of Tamils to Easter Island.

In geography, the antipode of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to each other are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth. Considering that around 71% of the Earth's surface is covered in ocean, less than 4% of land is antipodal to land and most of India only corresponds to water, with one exception. The antipode of India happens to be the legendary Easter Island, a relatively tiny land mass measuring 163 square kilometres. The island is also India's only antipode which does not lie on water. Did the ancient hindu mythologies refer  to the antipodes as ‘patala’ a place so deep that it reaches the other side of Earth?

The script at Mohenjo Daro is now believed to be related to ancient Dravidian, the fragments of this language still existing in southern India in the language of Tamil. An article in Scientific American (vol. 248, No. 3, March 1983) by Walter Fairservis, Jr. entitled The Script of the Indus Valley Civilization, describes the author’s attempts to decipher the writing. It makes no reference to the similarity of rongorongo script, but does say he believes that a form of Dravidian was the spoken language. 

The Tangata manu ("bird-man," from tangata "person, human being" + manu "bird") was the winner of a traditional competition on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Does it refer to Garuda well known in Hindu mythology? After all Manu is a well known Tamil name as in ‘Manu Needhi Cholan’.

The article by Benon ZB Szalek titled ‘Evidence for proto Indian origin of the Easter island writing system’ which appeared in 1989 in the Indian Journal of History of Science, further explored the Dravidian connection with Rongorongo. Some of the syllables and the words referring to in terms of symbol written in that article are really thought provoking. For example ‘Ma’ refers to tree (known as Maram in Tamil). ‘Mi’ refers to fish (Known as Min in Tamil). The script had pictures only representing sounds and a combination of sounds only implied what it meant. In the article one astounding word I could see was a combination of three syllables to represent help. It was SA-KA-YAwhich could be easily related to the Tamil word ‘sakayam’ meaning help. 

It probably is far fetched to think that an ancient Tamil civilization from the first Sangham era was a root of this language and script. The legendary founders of Rapa Nui, are said to have brought 67 tablets from their homeland. Where was their home land? Was it the ancient sunken Tamil land that was said to have existed south of present Tamil Nadu extending from Madagascar to Australia?



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