The natives who greeted the Dutch sailors on Easter Sunday 1722 seemed to have nothing in common with the giant statues of their island. Detailed geological analysis and new archaeological finds made it possible to uncover the mystery of these sculptures and learn about the tragic fate of the stonemasons.
The island became desolate, its stone sentries fell, and many of them drowned in the ocean. Only the pitiful remnants of the mysterious army managed to rise with outside help.
Briefly about Easter Island
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui in local parlance, is a tiny (165.5 sq. km) piece of land lost in the Pacific Ocean halfway between Tahiti and Chile. It is the most isolated inhabited place (about 2000 people) in the world - the nearest Town (about 50 people) is 1900 km away, on Pitcairn Island, where the rebellious Bounty crew found refuge in 1790.
The coastline of Rapa Nui is decorated with hundreds of frowning idols - the natives call them “moai”. Each is hewn from a single piece of volcanic rock; the height of some is almost 10 m. All the statues are made according to the same model: a long nose, drawn-out earlobes, a gloomily compressed mouth and a protruding chin over a stocky torso with arms pressed to the sides and palms resting on the stomach.
Many "moai" are installed with astronomical precision. For example, in one group, all seven statues look at the point (photo on the left) where the sun sets on the evening of the equinox. More than a hundred idols lie in the quarry, not completely hewn or almost finished and, apparently, waiting to be sent to their destination.
For more than 250 years, historians and archaeologists could not understand how and why, with a shortage of local resources, primitive islanders, completely cut off from the rest of the world, managed to process giant monoliths, drag them for kilometers over rough terrain and place them vertically. Many more or less scientific theories were proposed, with many experts believing that Rapa Nui was at one time inhabited by a highly developed people, perhaps bearers of American pre-Columbian culture, who died as a result of some kind of catastrophe.
A detailed analysis of its soil samples allowed us to reveal the secret of the island. The truth about what happened here can serve as a sobering lesson for people around the world.
Born sailors. Rapanui people once hunted dolphins from canoes dug out of palm trunks. However, the Dutch who discovered the island saw boats made of many planks fastened together - there were no large trees left.
History of the discovery of the island
On April 5, Easter Day 1722, three Dutch ships under the command of Captain Jacob Roggeveen stumbled upon an island in the Pacific Ocean that was not shown on any map. When they dropped anchor off its eastern shore, a few natives sailed up to them in their boats. Roggeveen was disappointed, The islanders' boats, he wrote: “poor and fragile... with a light frame covered with many small planks”. The boats were leaking so much that the rowers had to bail out water every now and then. The landscape of the island also did not warm the captain’s soul: “Its desolate appearance suggests extreme poverty and barrenness.”.
Conflict of civilizations. Easter Island idols now adorn museums in Paris and London, but obtaining these exhibits was not easy. The islanders knew each “moai” by name and did not want to part with any of them. When the French removed one of these statues in 1875, a crowd of natives had to be held back with rifle shots.
Despite the friendly behavior of the brightly colored natives, the Dutch went ashore, prepared for the worst, and formed into a battle square under the astonished gaze of their hosts, who had never seen other people, let alone firearms.
The visit was soon overshadowed by tragedy. One of the sailors fired. Then he claimed that he allegedly saw the islanders lifting stones and making threatening gestures. The “guests,” on Roggeveen’s orders, opened fire, killing 10-12 hosts on the spot and wounding as many more. The islanders fled in horror, but then returned to the shore with fruits, vegetables and poultry - to appease the ferocious newcomers. Roggeveen noted in his diary an almost bare landscape with rare bushes no higher than 3 m. On the island, which he named after Easter, the only things of interest were the unusual statues (heads) standing along the shore on massive stone platforms (“ahu”).
At first these idols shocked us. We could not understand how the islanders, who did not have strong ropes and a lot of construction wood for making mechanisms, were nevertheless able to erect statues (idols) at least 9 m high, and quite voluminous ones at that.
Scientific approach. French traveler Jean Francois La Perouse landed on Easter Island in 1786, accompanied by a chronicler, three naturalists, an astronomer and a physicist. As a result of 10 hours of research, he suggested that in the past the area was wooded.
Who were the Rapanui people?
People settled Easter Island only around the year 400. It is generally accepted that they arrived in huge boats from Eastern Polynesia. Their language is close to the dialects of the inhabitants of the Hawaiian and Marquesas Islands. Ancient fishing hooks and stone adzes of the Rapanui people found during excavations are similar to the tools used by the Marquesanes.
At first, European sailors encountered naked islanders, but by the 19th century they were weaving their own clothes. However, family heirlooms were more valued than ancient crafts. Men sometimes wore headdresses made from the feathers of birds long extinct on the island. Women wove straw hats. Both of them pierced their ears and wore bone and wooden jewelry in them. As a result, the earlobes were pulled back and hung almost to the shoulders.
Lost Generations - Answers Found
In March 1774, the English captain James Cook discovered about 700 natives emaciated from malnutrition on Easter Island. He suggested that the local economy had been badly damaged by the recent volcanic eruption: this was evidenced by the many stone idols that collapsed from their platforms. Cook was convinced: they were hewn out and placed along the coast by the distant ancestors of the current Rapanui people.
“This work, which took an enormous amount of time, clearly demonstrates the ingenuity and tenacity of those who lived here during the era of the statues’ creation. Today’s islanders almost certainly have no time for this, because they do not even repair the foundations of those that are about to collapse.”
Scientists have only recently found answers to some of the mysteries of the Moai. Analysis of pollen from sediments accumulated in the island's swamps shows that it was once covered with dense forests, thickets of ferns and shrubs. All this was teeming with a variety of game.
Exploring the stratigraphic (and chronological) distribution of finds, scientists discovered in the lower, most ancient layers the pollen of an endemic tree close to the wine palm, up to 26 m high and up to 1.8 m in diameter. Its long, straight, unbranched trunks could serve as excellent rollers for transportation of blocks weighing tens of tons. Pollen of the plant “hauhau” (triumphetta semi-three-lobed) was also found, from the bast of which ropes are made in Polynesia (and not only).
The fact that the ancient Rapanui people had enough food follows from DNA analysis of food remains on excavated dishes. The islanders grew bananas, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, taro, and yams.
The same botanical data demonstrate the slow but sure destruction of this idyll. Judging by the contents of swamp sediments, by 800 the forest area was declining. Tree pollen and fern spores are displaced from later layers by charcoal - evidence of forest fires. At the same time, woodcutters worked more and more actively.
Wood shortages began to seriously affect the islanders' way of life, especially their menus. A study of fossilized garbage heaps shows that at one time the Rapa Nui people regularly ate dolphin meat. Obviously, they caught these animals swimming in the open sea from large boats hollowed out from thick palm trunks.
When there was no ship timber left, the Rapanui people lost their “ocean fleet,” and with it their dolphin meat and ocean fish. In 1786, the chronicler of the French expedition La Perouse wrote that in the sea the islanders only caught shellfish and crabs that lived in shallow waters.
The end of the moai
Stone statues began to appear around the 10th century. They probably represent Polynesian gods or deified local chiefs. According to Rapa Nui legends, the supernatural power of “mana” raised the hewn idols, led them to a designated place and allowed them to wander at night, protecting the peace of the makers. Perhaps the clans competed with each other, trying to carve the “moai” larger and more beautiful, and also to place it on a more massive platform than its competitors.
After 1500, practically no statues were made. Apparently, there were no trees left on the devastated island necessary to transport and raise them. Since about the same time, palm pollen has not been found in swamp sediments, and dolphin bones are no longer thrown into garbage dumps. The local fauna is also changing. All local land birds and half of the sea birds are disappearing.
The food supply is getting worse, and the population, which once numbered about 7,000 people, is declining. Since 1805, the island has suffered from raids by South American slave traders: they take away some of the natives, many of the remaining ones suffer from smallpox contracted from strangers. Only a few hundred Rapa Nui survive.
The inhabitants of Easter Island erected “moai”, hoping for the protection of the spirits embodied in stone. Ironically, it was this monumental program that led their land to environmental disaster. And the idols rise as eerie monuments to thoughtless management and human recklessness.
Easter Island is a tiny piece of lava, its outline reminiscent of a Napoleonic cocked hat, surrounded by ocean, expanse of heaven and silence for thousands of miles around. Unless, of course, you take into account the cries of seagulls and the monotonous rhythm of the ocean surf. As the tireless explorer of the island, Catherine Roopledge, wrote, “whoever lives here is always listening to something, although he himself does not know what, and involuntarily feels himself on the threshold of something even greater, lying beyond the limits of our perception.”
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Everywhere on the island there are traces of a bygone past - in the long corridors of countless caves strewn with fragments of obsidian; on the slopes of volcanoes covered with the remains of a disappeared culture; in the eye sockets of stone giants, some of which lie staring at the zenith, while others tower above the island, gazing into the unknown distance.
One of the famous mathematicians noticed that life on earth is an immense kingdom of approximate quantities. It seems this thesis quite convincingly demonstrates our ideas about Easter Island. So when it comes to the origin of the island, the origins of its ancient civilization, the purpose of the mysterious stone colossi and many other things that make up its many mysteries, it is always useful to remember the relativity of the knowledge that the scientific world has today.
Interest in this tiny volcanic formation, lost in the vastness of the ocean, has not waned over time. And the number of publications about this place is growing every year. It is difficult to say whether this makes us closer to the truth, but something else is certain: Easter Island knows how to puzzle and surprise.
A similar feeling arose in Thor Heyerdahl in the face of exciting uncertainty when he studied the mysterious island, where the inhabitants “built neither castles, nor palaces, nor dams, nor piers. They hewed gigantic humanoid figures from stone, tall as a house, heavy as carriage, dragged many of them through mountains and valleys, and installed them on powerful terraces at all ends of the island..."
The tireless desire of the ancient inhabitants of the island to carve out huge stone figures, the largest of which was the height of a seven-story building and weighed 88 tons, bore fruit: there are many hundreds of them on the island. They say about a thousand maoi (the local name for the statues - author's note). But each time the next archaeological expedition discovers more and more statues.
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One of the island's explorers, Pierre Loti, described his impressions of the stone giants as follows: “What human race do these statues belong to, with slightly upturned noses and thin protruding lips, expressing either contempt or mockery. Instead of eyes, there are only deep depressions, but under with an arch of wide noble eyebrows, they seem to look and think. On both sides of the cheeks there are protrusions depicting either a headdress similar to the cap of a sphinx, or protruding flat ears five to eight meters long. Some wear necklaces inlaid with flint, others are decorated with carved tattoo."
The statues described by Pierre Loti are considered by a number of island researchers to be the most ancient. But besides these, there are sculptures of a different kind. “Every day we find statues of a different style - of other people,” wrote Francis Mazières, who visited the island with a scientific expedition in the mid-60s of the last century. “Facing their backs to the sea, placed on giant funeral platforms made of stone - ahu, they seem to be "They monitor the life of the island. They and only they have open eyes. On the heads of these statues are huge red cylinders made of red tuff."
Thor Heyerdahl's expedition discovered a bearded figure in a sitting position. It was not like other island sculptures, causing a lot of speculation about its origin.
The French explorer Francis Mazière became the owner of a human figurine made of wood, which, in terms of its execution, was strikingly different from everything he had seen on the island before. This prompted the researcher to suggest that this figurine has nothing to do with Polynesian traditions and belongs to a different race.
Surprises await explorers in the labyrinths of the island caves. Rock frescoes were discovered in one of them. One of them resembles a penguin with a whale's tail. Another depicts the head of an unknown creature. This is the head of a bearded man with insect eyes. Deer antlers branch on his skull. The islanders call him "the insect man."
But what peoples created eyeless giants at the foot of the Raku-Raraku volcano? Who is the creator of the giants that stand along the coast? Whose hand painted the head of an “insect man” in one of the caves? “The local residents cannot explain anything,” wrote Francis Mazières. “They tell such a confusing jumble of legends that one would think that they never knew anything and that they are not at all the descendants of the last sculptors.”
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A modern tourist visiting the island, as a rule, is presented as an “exotic dish” with a story about a war between two island tribes - the “long-eared” and the “short-eared”. There is still a legend in circulation about the arrival of Hotu-Matua, the leader of the ancestors of the current islanders, on the island. "The land that Hotu-Matua owned was called Maori and was located on Hiva... The leader noticed that his land was slowly sinking into the sea. He gathered his servants, men, women, children and old people and put them on two large boats. When they reached the horizon, the leader saw that the whole land, with the exception of a small part called Maori, had gone under water."
These stories may contain echoes of some ancient events. Their fragmentary and vague nature makes it impossible to even get closer to the true history of the island. Even the purpose of the statues is not clear.
James Cook believed that the stone idols were built in honor of the buried rulers and leaders of the island. Professor Metro thought that the statues depict deified people. The American scientist Thomson believed that the statues were portraits of noble people, and another explorer of the island, Maximilian Brown, believed that they depicted their creators. Katherine Roopledge said that stone figures are images of gods. Admiral Roggevahn, without expressing himself specifically, only noticed that local residents lit a fire in front of the statues and, squatting, bowed their heads.
Among Western researchers there is a “competitive” version about the purpose of the statues. According to it, the tribes living on the island were at enmity with each other for the right to be first. And supposedly prestige in this tireless struggle was won, among other things, by the number of statues carved by each rival tribe. Thus, according to this version, statues are not even a goal, but only a means of self-affirmation for people.
It is unlikely that the “native” of the island, old Veriveri, would agree with such an interpretation, who once told Francis Mazières, as a sign of special trust, the following: “All maoi (statues) of Raku-Raraku are sacred and face the part of the world over which they have power and which are responsible. That is why the island was given the name Te-Pito-o-te-Whenua, or the Navel of the Earth... The Maoi, who face the south, are different from the rest. They retain the strength of the Arctic winds..."
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Easter Island, the Navel of the Earth... But these are not the only names of the island. Our compatriot Miklukha Maclay recorded the following local name - "Mata-ki-te-Rangi". James Cook recorded several at once: “Vanhu”, “Tamareki”, “Teapi”. The Polynesians called the island "Rapanui", and the islanders still call it "Te-Pito-o-te-Whenua".
Many who visited the island paid attention to the striking disproportion between the giant statues, quarries of truly cyclopean scale and the modest-sized residential buildings of the local residents.
“The obvious disproportion of the ahu with the overthrown statues compared to the remains of the houses was striking. The statues towered over the village, fixing their gaze on it. With their backs to the sea, these giants seemed to be called upon to support the courage of the human captives of the land lost in the ocean.” So wrote Francis Mazières. These lines also belong to him:
“The walls of the quarry, hollowed out in the shape of a crater, are located on a very steep slope, and a lot of work had to be done, not only to make cylinders out of it (Maoi headdresses. - Author's note). And here, as elsewhere on the island, it seems as if ordinary human scale did not suit those who worked in this quarry."
Meanwhile, Rapa Nui can hardly be called an ideal abode for the realization of titanically energy-intensive fantasies. To begin with, food and water resources on the island are limited. Fresh water, the main source of replenishment of which for centuries has been rain, is deprived of many mineral salts necessary for the body - this is the result of filtration of water as it passes through the spongy volcanic rocks of the island. Drinking such water, according to experts, led to serious illnesses.
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Obtaining food itself required, apparently, enormous energy costs. And, of course, she was missed. This is evidenced by the fact that cannibalism was developed on the island relatively recently. According to evidence, even two Peruvian merchants became victims of cannibals.
Most scientists have come to the conclusion that the first, unknown to us, civilization, which was the creator of the Maoi, other colossi, was subsequently destroyed and assimilated by the second migration, the decline of which has been observed on Rapa Nui for at least the last three hundred years.
“On the island you can find traces of a prehistoric people,” concludes Francis Mazières, “whose presence we are beginning to feel more and more and which forces us to reconsider all the data about time and ethics that science is now imposing on us...”
Let's go back to the present day. In the early 60s of the last century, a powerful tidal wave that penetrated 600 meters deep into the island, some Maoi were thrown back to a distance of up to 100 meters. Work to restore the statues began relatively recently - there was no appropriate lifting equipment. It was only after the Japanese company Tadano donated $700,000 and delivered a powerful crane to the island that things started to take off. This year, many maoi that were toppled by the tsunami were raised. But the question arises: how did the ancient inhabitants of the island move the stone giants, the smallest of which weighs at least 35 tons? All hypotheses that have arisen around this problem can be divided into three categories. Fantastic ones appeal to alien power. The rationalistic approach relies on the islanders using all kinds of ropes, winches, winches, rollers... There is even a version according to which the statues moved along a road several kilometers long, covered with sweet potato puree, which made it slippery.
There is also a hypothesis of a mystical nature. According to the islanders, the statues moved through the spiritual power of mana, which was possessed by the leaders of their distant ancestors. “What if in a certain era,” asks Francis Mazières, “people were able to use electromagnetic forces or anti-gravity forces? This assumption is crazy, but still less stupid than the story of the crushed sweet potato.”
Of course, you can assume anything, but in the face of a 22-meter-high colossus, ordinary logic becomes powerless.
Easter Island is sometimes compared to a fragment of lava, on which, without any transitional steps, the most original art and the most mysterious writing in the world arose. The latter is a fact all the more significant since until now writing has not been discovered on the Polynesian islands. On Easter Island, writing was discovered on relatively well-preserved wooden tablets, called kohau rongo-rongo in the local dialect. The fact that the wooden planks have survived the darkness of centuries is explained by many scientists by the complete absence of insects on the island. Yet most of them were eventually destroyed. But the culprit for this turned out to be not tree bugs, accidentally introduced by a white man, but the religious fervor of a certain missionary. The story goes that the missionary Eugene Eyraud, who converted the inhabitants of the island to Christianity, forced these writings to be burned as pagan. So even tiny Easter Island got its own Herostratus.
Nevertheless, a certain number of tablets have survived. Today, there are no more than two dozen kohau rongorongo in museums and private collections around the world. Many attempts have been made to decipher the contents of the ideogram tablets, but they all ended in failure. As well as an attempt to explain the purpose of paved roads, the time of their creation is lost in the mists of time. On the Island of Silence - another name for the island - there are three of them. And all three end up in the ocean. Based on this, some researchers conclude that the island was once much larger than it is now.
Near Rapa Nui is the tiny island of Motunui. This is several hundred meters of steep cliff, dotted with numerous grottoes. A stone platform has been preserved on it, on which statues were once installed, which were later thrown into the sea for some reason. “How could people build an ahu with a maoi there,” reflects Francis Mazières, “where we cannot approach even by boat? There, where it is impossible to climb the rock? What mass carried these multi-ton giants here? The theory of using a bed of yams is equally powerless here , and the theory of wooden rollers!"
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Was Easter Island once part of a larger landmass? There are still ongoing debates around this issue in the scientific world. In the second half of the 19th century, well-known scientists at that time, Alfred Wallace and Thomas Huxley, hypothesized that the population of Oceania, including the inhabitants of Easter Island, was a remnant of the “oceanic” race that lived on the now sunken continent.
Academician Obruchev generally supported this theory. He believed that when the continent began to gradually sink under water, the population of the elevated territories began to carve stone statues and place them in the lowlands, in the hope that this would appease the gods and stop the advance of the sea. Sometimes this continent appeared in scientific hypotheses as Pacifida, sometimes as Lemuria.
The modern scientific world, with a few exceptions, perceives this kind of hypothesis with a great deal of skepticism. But on the other hand, history knows many examples when, at first glance, a completely crazy idea turned out to be true. Let us recall at least the classic case with the hypothesis of “stones that fall from the sky.” In 1790, a meteorite fell in Gascony. A protocol was drawn up, signed by three hundred eyewitnesses, which was sent to the French Academy of Sciences. But the “tall Areopagus” called all this stupidity, since science was well aware that stones cannot fall from the sky. But this is true, by the way.
Recently, two hypotheses have become most widespread: the hypothesis of the American origin of Polynesians and Polynesian culture (to which a number of scientists include the Rapanui civilization) and the hypothesis of the settlement of the Polynesian islands from the west. Thor Heyerdahl argued that Polynesia was inhabited by two waves of migration. The first arrived from the South American Pacific coast (the location of modern Peru). Polynesia owes the appearance of stone statues and hieroglyphic writing to settlers of Andean origin. The second wave came at the beginning of this millennium from the northwest coast of North America. At one time there was a rumor about the Vikings who sailed to Easter Island in ancient times and settled there. In some versions, they try to interpret the history of the island’s civilization from the perspective of ethnogenesis: supposedly the first settlers, who had a high level of passionarity, were the only ones in all of Polynesia who knew writing. But gradually, century after century, the original level of passionarity began to dissipate, which ultimately led to the obstruction and extinction of culture...
Will our knowledge of Easter Island become more accurate? In any case, a number of researchers, for example our compatriots F. Krendelev and A. Kondratov, rely on this in their book “Silent Guardians of Secrets.” “The mysteries of Easter Island are one of the most pressing and pressing problems of modern geology,” they write. “One can hope that the data obtained by geophysicists, geologists, oceanologists, volcanologists and other representatives of the exact sciences will be able to shed new light on long-known facts and to help find solutions to problems that ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians have struggled with unsuccessfully.”
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It must be said that today the “exact sciences” have brought a number of interesting data to the problems of the island’s evolution. Rapa Nui is located in a unique place from a geological point of view. Beneath it is the fault boundary of giant tectonic plates, which seem to divide the ocean floor. The oceanic plates Nazca and Pacifica and the axial zones of underwater ocean ridges converge on the island. Which gives another reason to think about the symbolic name of the island. This is truly a kind of “Navel of the Earth”.
Today, the main wealth of the inhabitants of Rapa Nui is, of course, the mysterious past of their small island. It is precisely this that attracts scientists from all over the world here, which is why planes with tourists land at the local airport twice a week. At such hours, the life of the island, unhurried and monotonous, like the ocean surf, comes to life. The small airport building is filled with multilingual polyphony: someone is looking for a guide, someone is offering a car for rent, someone needs a hotel... But a few hours pass, and again peace and quiet reign over the island. You can count the number of cars here on your fingers. And they also obey the general rhythm of unhurried existence. In these parts, a speed of 50 kilometers per hour looks like unforgivable recklessness. Along the roads from time to time there are signs limiting the speed to 30 kilometers.
Easter Island is not in too much of a rush into the future. Modernity - air travel, the Internet, telephone communications - has a limited sphere of influence here. The true owners of the island are still the silent stone guards, firmly holding their secrets in securely closed lips.
The publication is based on Russian and foreign materials about Easter Island.
When mentioning this island, an association usually arises with huge stone idols, installed by no one knows who, how, when and why. However, on a small piece of land in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, so many different mysteries are concentrated that it would be more than enough for an entire continent.
The Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen, who set out from Amsterdam in search of the mysterious South Land, was perhaps not the first European to discover Easter Island. But he was the first to describe it and determine the coordinates. And the European name for the island was given by Roggeveen, whose ships moored to it on April 5, 1722. It was Easter Sunday.
The sailors were met by blacks, redskins and, finally, completely white people who had unusually long earlobes. The ship's log noted that local residents “lit fires in front of very tall stone statues with ...>, which amazed us, since we could not understand how these people, having neither timber nor strong ropes, were able to erect them.” .
The famous captain James Cook landed on the island half a century later, in 1774, and was no less amazed than Roggeveen, noting the incredible contrast between the giant statues and the wretched life of the indigenous population: “It was difficult for us to imagine how the islanders, deprived of technology, were able to install these amazing figures and, in addition, place huge cylindrical stones on their heads,” he wrote.
According to both Cook and Roggeveen, about 3,000 natives lived there, calling their island either Mata-ki-te-Ragi, which means “eyes looking at the sky”, or Te-Pito-o-te-henua, that is, “navel” Earth." Thanks to Tahitian sailors, the island is often called Rapa Nui (translated as “Big Rapa”) to distinguish it from the island of Rapa Iti, which lies 650 km south of Tahiti.
It is now a treeless island with infertile volcanic soil and a population of less than 5,000 people. However, before it was densely forested and bustling with life, witnessed by giant stone statues - moai, as the aborigines called them. According to local beliefs, the moai contains the supernatural power of the ancestors of the first king of Easter Island, Hotu Matu'a.
Strange, similar to each other, with the same facial expression and incredibly elongated ears, they are scattered throughout the island. Once upon a time, the statues stood on pedestals, facing the center of the island - this was seen by the first Europeans who visited the island. But then all the idols, and there are 997 of them, found themselves lying on the ground.
Everything that exists on the island today was restored in the last century. The last restoration of 15 moai, located between the Rano Raraku volcano and the Poike Peninsula, was carried out by the Japanese in 1992-1995.
On the slopes of this volcano there is a quarry where ancient craftsmen, using basalt cutters and heavy stone picks, carved moai from soft volcanic tuff. The height of most statues is 5-7 m, the height of later sculptures reached 10-12 m. The average weight of a moai is about 10 tons, but there are also much heavier ones. The quarry is full of unfinished statues, work on which was interrupted for an unknown reason.
The moai are located on massive ahu pedestals along the coast of the island at a distance of 10-15 km from the quarries. Ahu reached 150 m in length and 3 m in height and consisted of pieces weighing up to 10 tons. It is not surprising that these giants amazed European sailors, and then the world community. How did the ancient inhabitants of the island manage to do this, whose descendants eked out a miserable existence and did not give the impression of being heroes?
How did they drag fully finished, processed and polished statues through mountains and valleys, while managing not to damage them along the way? How did they perch them on the ahu? How did they then place stone “hats” weighing from 2 to 10 tons on their heads? And finally, how did these sculptors appear on the world's most inland inhabited island?
But these are not all the secrets of Rapa Nui. In 1770, they decided to annex the abandoned piece of land under the name of San Carlos to the possessions of the Spanish crown. When the leader of the Spanish expedition, Captain Felipe Gonzalez de Aedo, drew up an act of annexation of the island and signed it, the leaders of the local tribes also put their signatures under the text - they carefully drew some strange signs on the paper. As intricate as the tattoos on their bodies or the drawings on the coastal rocks. So, there was writing on the island?!
It turns out that there was. In every aboriginal home there were wooden tablets with signs carved on them. The Rapa Nui people called their writing kohau rongorongo. Now in museums around the world there are 25 tablets, their fragments, as well as stone figurines, dotted with the same mysterious signs.
Alas, this is all that remains after the educational activities of Christian missionaries. And even the oldest inhabitants of the island cannot explain the meaning of even one sign, let alone read the text.
In 1914-1915 The leader of the English expedition to Rapa Nui, Mrs. Catherine Scoresby Roughledge, found an old man named Tomenika who was able to write several characters. But he did not want to initiate the stranger into the secret of Rongorongo, declaring that the ancestors would punish anyone who revealed the secret of the letter to the aliens. Catherine Routledge's diaries had barely been published when she herself suddenly died, and the expedition materials were lost...
Forty years after the death of Tomenica, the Chilean scientist Jorge Silva Olivares met his grandson, Pedro Pate, who inherited the rongo-rongo dictionary from his grandfather. Olivares managed to photograph the notebook with the words of the ancient language, but, as he himself writes, “the reel of film turned out to be either lost or stolen. The notebook itself has disappeared.”
In 1956, the Norwegian ethnographer and traveler Thor Heyerdahl learned that the islander Esteban Atan had a notebook with all the ancient writing signs and their meanings in Latin letters. But when the famous traveler tried to look at the notebook, Esteban immediately hid it. Soon after the meeting, the native sailed in a small homemade boat to Tahiti, and no one heard from him or the notebook again.
Scientists from many countries have tried to decipher the mysterious signs, but they have not succeeded so far. However, similarities were discovered between the writing of Easter Island and the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, ancient Chinese picture writing and the writings of Mohenjo-Aaro and Harappa.
Another mystery of the island is related to... its regular disappearance. Only in the 20th century. Several amazing cases have been documented when he quite cleverly “hid” from sailors. So, in August 1908, the Chilean steamer Gloria, after a long voyage, was going to replenish its supply of fresh water there. But when the ship reached the point marked by the navigator, there was no island there!
The calculation showed that the ship had passed straight through the island and was now moving away from it. The captain ordered to turn back, but calculations showed that the Gloria was located right in the center of the island!
20 years later, a tourist liner was supposed to pass several miles from Easter Island, but it was nowhere to be seen even with the most powerful binoculars. The captain immediately sent a sensational radiogram to Chile. The Chilean authorities reacted quickly: a gunboat left the port of Valparaiso towards the mysterious place, but the island was again in its usual place.
During World War II, two German submarines were heading to Easter Island, where a refueling tanker was waiting for them. But there was neither a tanker nor an island at the meeting place. For several hours, the boats plowed the ocean in fruitless searches. Finally, the commander of one of the submarines decided to break the radio silence and got in touch with the tanker. They met only 200 miles from Easter Island, and the second submarine disappeared without a trace...
Many researchers assumed that the local population originated from India, Egypt, the Caucasus, Scandinavia and, of course, Atlantis. Heyerdahl hypothesized that the island was inhabited by settlers from Ancient Peru. Indeed, the stone sculptures are very reminiscent of the figurines found in the Andes. Sweet potatoes, common in Peru, are grown on the island. And Peruvian legends spoke of the battle of the Incas with the people of the northern white gods.
After losing the battle, their leader Kon-Tiki led his people west across the ocean. On the island there are legends about a powerful leader named Tupa who arrived from the east (perhaps this was the tenth Sapa Inca Tupac Yupanqui). According to the Spanish traveler and scientist of the 16th century. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, at that time the Incas had a fleet of balsa rafts on which they could reach Easter Island.
Using folklore descriptions, Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki raft from 9 balsa logs and proved that it was possible to overcome the distance between South America and Polynesia in ancient times. Nevertheless, the theory of the Peruvian origin of the ancient population of Easter Island did not convince the scientific world. Genetic analysis rather points to its Polynesian origin, and the Rapa Nui language belongs to the Polynesian family. Scientists also argue about the date of settlement, calling the time from 400 to 1200.
The possible history of Easter Island (according to later reconstructions) looks like this.
The first settlers erected small statues without “hats” made of stone on their heads, built ceremonial buildings and held festivals in honor of the god Make-Make. Then strangers arrived on the island. Because of their artificially elongated ears, they were nicknamed Hanau-eepe - “long-eared” (Heyerdahl argued that the long-eared ones were the Peruvian Indians who settled on the island around 475, and the aborigines were Polynesians).
Having settled on the Poike Peninsula, they initially lived peacefully, distinguished by their unique culture, the presence of writing and other skills. Arriving on Rapa Nui without women, the newcomers married representatives of the indigenous tribe, who began to be called hanau-momoko - “short-eared”. Gradually, the Hanau-Eepe settled the entire eastern part of the island, and then subjugated the Hanau-Momoko, which aroused hatred from the latter.
From this time on, the construction of stone giants with rough faces began, far from the previous realistic manner. The ahu platforms are constructed with less care, but now they are topped with statues with their backs facing the sea. Perhaps they were transported to the coast on wooden sleds lubricated with fish oil. At that time, most of the island was covered with palm trees, so there were no problems with wooden skating rinks.
But local residents, whom Thor Heyerdahl asked about how giant stone figures were transported in ancient times, answered him that they walked themselves. Heyerdahl and other enthusiasts have found several ways to transport stone idols in an upright position.
For example, with the help of ropes, the moai were tilted, resting on one of the corners of the base, and rotated around this axis using wooden levers. At the same time, groups of riggers used ropes to keep the block from tilting excessively.
From the outside it really seemed that the moai themselves were moving along the paved roads that were actually laid on the island. The problem is that the terrain of the volcanic island is literally rugged, and it is not clear how to move multi-ton giants up and down the hills surrounding Rano Raraku.
Be that as it may, the moai were created, moved and placed on pedestals by hanau-momoko under the leadership of hanau-eepe. Such hard labor could not do without victims, and the population of the island, even in the best of times, according to scientists, did not exceed 10-15 thousand people. In addition, cannibalism was practiced on Rapa Nui.
The Rapanui people were a warlike people, as evidenced by the numerous clashes between local residents described in legends. And the defeated often became the main dish during the celebration of victory. Given the dominance of long-eared animals, it is not difficult to figure out whose fate was worse. And the short-eared one eventually rebelled.
The few long-eared ones fled to the Poike Peninsula, where they took refuge behind a wide ditch 2 km long. To prevent the enemy from overcoming the barrier, they cut down the surrounding palm trees and dumped them in a ditch to set them on fire in case of danger. But the short-eared ones in the darkness bypassed the enemies from the rear and threw them into the burning ditch.
All Hanau-Eepe were exterminated. The symbols of their power - the moai - were thrown off their pedestals, and work in the quarries stopped. This epoch-making event for the island probably occurred just shortly after the discovery of the island by Europeans, because at the end of the 18th century. The sailors no longer saw the idols standing on the pedestals.
However, by that time the degradation of the community had become irreversible. Most of the forests were destroyed. With their disappearance, people lost the building materials to make huts and boats. And since the best craftsmen and agronomists were destroyed with the extermination of the long-eared animals, life on Easter Island soon turned into an everyday struggle for existence, the companion of which was cannibalism, which again began to gain momentum.
However, missionaries fought quite successfully against the latter, converting the natives to Christianity. But in 1862, the island was invaded by Peruvian slave traders, who captured and carried away 900 people, including the last king. They destroyed some of the statues, after which many aborigines and missionaries who lived there fled from the island.
And diseases brought by pirates - smallpox, tuberculosis, leprosy - reduced the size of the island’s already small population to a hundred people. Most of the priests of the island died, who buried with them all the secrets of Rapa Nui. The next year, missionaries landing on the island found no signs of the unique civilization that had recently existed, which the locals placed at the center of the world.
Easter Island and its 887 giant Moai statues are one of the mysterious and isolated corners of the planet.
Every year many theories appear that explain the mysteries of the island, the origin of its buildings and the aborigines - the Rapa Nui tribe.
Moai Moai Statues
For many years, the subject of heated debate was the question of how the Moai statues got to their place, because the largest of them weighs about 74 tons. How could such a huge thing be moved? In the folklore of the Rapa Nui tribe, stone sculptures “walked” on their own, coming to life under the influence of magic. Scientists from many countries tried to understand the physical background of such magic.
In 1997, Czech engineer Pavel Pavel and Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl built their own Moai statue. They tied ropes at the top and base and, with the help of 16 people, smoothly rocking the block from side to side, they were able to successfully move it. According to experts, using this method, people without the help of additional equipment are able to move statues 100 meters per day.
Disturbance of natural balance
A well-known theory states that the natives methodically cut down the island's forests to make way for agricultural land, mistakenly believing that the trees would regrow quickly enough and the natural conditions would not be disturbed. Population growth has exacerbated the problem of vegetation depletion, which has led to a lack of resources and a catastrophic decline in the number of island residents.
However, scientists now suggest that the Rapa Nui people were actually very wise farmers. Soil tests show that the fields were deliberately fertilized with a substance from volcanic rock. The actions of the islanders in cutting down the forest were also justified: by doing so, they replaced these territories with meadows. Research results show that Easter Island did not suffer from an agricultural crisis, and its population began to decline only after the first Europeans visited.
It's all about the rats
There is an alternative explanation for the decline in the native population. The lack of predators and abundance of food on the island provided a paradise for the rats who arrived in the canoes of the early settlers. Although people cut down and burned trees, it was the activity of rats that prevented vegetation from regenerating.
However, despite the fact that rats contributed negatively to the island's ecosystem, they provided the islanders with a source of meat food. Rat bones discovered by archaeologists indicate the gastronomic interest of the Easter Island aborigines in these rodents. When working in the fields, people preferred to take lunch from these animals with them.
Alien Gifts
Among lovers of the supernatural, there is a popular theory about the extraterrestrial origin of the Easter Island statues. Supporters of this point of view claim that stone sculptures are too complex to make for primitive tribes, so representatives of a more developed civilization probably had a hand in creating these objects.
But, to the disappointment of supporters of space theories, analyzes show the completely terrestrial nature of the stone from which the statues are made: the material was taken from the slopes of an extinct volcano on the northeastern side of the island, and not from another planet. The mystery of the origin of the idols, of course, does not clear up much from this, but scientists are more interested in the meaning of these objects. There is an assumption that each of the statues represented the head of a revered family.
Roads with unclear purpose
In 2010, archaeologists announced that they had debunked the hitherto current theory about the movement of Moai statues around the island. In 1958, Thor Heyerdahl stated that the ancient roads discovered there were intended for transport needs. Proof of this assumption were the finds of stone statues lying along the roads. Heyerdahl believed that the statues were suddenly abandoned during the move for unknown reasons. This theory contradicted the opinion of the British archaeologist Catherine Rutledge, who believed these “roads” to be ceremonial objects.
Recent research has shown that Rutledge's view is correct. Ancient roads have a concave shape, making the movement of vehicles on them extremely difficult. Nobody dropped the statues on them during transportation - they simply fell from a standing position. A recent archaeological expedition to Easter Island provided information that all such roads lead to the extinct volcano Rano Raraku. It is likely that the volcano was considered as the sacred center of the island.
Stone torsos for stone heads
During excavations in 2011, it was discovered that many statues depicting massive heads have equally massive stone torsos buried in the ground. At one time, Heyerdahl had already discovered a stone torso, but only now have archaeologists begun to come across similar finds in large quantities. Torsos hidden in the ground cover petroglyphs that have not yet been deciphered. In addition to the stone bodies of the Moai giants, there were ropes and logs in the ground, which, according to researchers, were designed to lift the statues and give them a vertical position.
Cult of the Birdman
The Rano Kao crater located on the island served as the site of annual competitions in honor of the god of fertility Makemake. The winner was the person who passed a series of tests. He had to climb down the incredibly steep slopes of the crater and swim out into the open sea to a nearby island without being eaten by a shark. On the island it was necessary to get an egg and return back, delivering it to the starting point safe and sound. The one who coped with this extremely difficult task received the title “Tangata Manu” (Bird Man) and became the ruler of the island. The cult of Tangata Manu was the main religion of the Rapa Nui tribe until 1867, when missionaries arrived on the island, where disease was raging at that time, and converted the weakened people to Christianity. As a result of this, the entire cultural heritage of the islanders instantly depreciated. Deprived of their usual atmosphere, the natives gradually moved their homes to a small area of the island, freeing up the rest of the space for cattle breeding. Very few of their descendants retained the memory of the traditions of the Rapa Nui tribe.
Tukituri
Tukituri is a Moai statue depicting a man in a sitting position, probably a singer. This statue is much smaller than all the others on the island, and its facial features are more detailed and human-like. In addition, this statue is unique in that it was not made from the usual Moai stone. The gaze of the idol is directed towards the Rano Kao crater, which gives rise to speculation about its connection with the cult of the Bird Man.
Another theory suggests that Tukituri may have been the result of experiments with new stone carving techniques. The statue was found in the 50s and remains one of the most intriguing objects on the island.
Almost everyone who is interested in the mysteries of the ancient history of our civilization knows about Easter Island with its famous stone idols. Huge stone statues, the still undeciphered writing Kohau Rongorongo, mysterious bird people supposedly living in the dungeons of the island - these are just some of the secrets of a small piece of land lost in the vast ocean.
The Davis Land Mystery
For almost two centuries, Spanish, English and Dutch sailors sailed the Pacific Ocean, hoping to discover " Terra incognita australis" - "the unknown southern land." However, instead of the “big prize” - the supposed impressive mainland - they became the discoverers of tens and hundreds of islands of various sizes, both uninhabited and inhabited. No one saw any particular tragedy in the failures; the ocean was so large that the hope of discovering something more significant in its vastness than an ordinary island remained for a long time.
In 1687, the English filibuster Edward Davis set off in search of the Southern continent on a ship with a rather curious name - “Bachelor's Pleasure”. From the coast of South America, Davis directed his ship to the Galapagos Islands. About 500 nautical miles from the coast, he discovered a low sandy island, 20 miles to the west of which a fairly long and high strip of land could be seen. Surprisingly, Davis did not explore the lands he had discovered, but continued on his way, apparently hoping to find something more significant.
This is how the mystery of “Davis Land” arose, because after the filibuster and the crew of his ship, no one saw these lands again. They tried to find the islands discovered by Davis more than once, but all attempts were in vain. Was it a mirage, or did the islands discovered by Davis plunge into the abyss of water in a short time? Or maybe the filibuster did not very accurately determine the coordinates of the lands he discovered and later his islands were discovered by other navigators?
Stone statues amazed the Dutch
It was during the search for Davis Land that the famous Easter Island was discovered by the Dutch admiral Jacob Roggeveen. In April 1722, on Easter Sunday, three Dutch frigates approached a previously unknown island to Europeans, which Admiral Roggeveen, the commander of the flotilla, named Easter Island in honor of the holy day. At first glance, it was clear that this island had nothing to do with Davis Land. The Dutch were amazed by the giant stone statues they saw on the shore, some of which had already been knocked down by that time.
Roggeveen wrote in the ship's log:
“These stone statues at first amazed us, for we could not understand how people who had neither heavy, thick logs to make tools, nor strong enough ropes, could erect statues that were at least thirty feet high and a corresponding width."
Friedrich Behrens, Roggeveen's companion, made an interesting observation concerning the inhabitants of the island. The natives, according to his testimony,
“The colors were brown, like the Spaniards, but among them there were also blacker ones and even completely white ones, as well as many red ones, as if burned by the sun. Their ears were so long that they hung down to their shoulders; some wore white tubers in their ears as a special decoration.”
Such differences in skin color could indicate settlement of the island from several directions, although based on its size this was unlikely.
Alas, the very first meeting with the Europeans ended in tragedy for the islanders: the Dutch decided to roughly punish them for petty thefts and shot several people. In subsequent years, ships visited the island more and more often; their visits usually ended in epidemics of disease, violence and other misfortunes for its inhabitants. The worst thing happened on December 12, 1862, when Peruvian slave traders descended on the island and took away 1,000 of the healthiest men and women from the island. After public protests, the survivors (only 100 people!) were returned to the island, but they brought smallpox with them. Of the 5,000 islanders, only 600 survived! The dead took with them to the grave the solution to many of the island's secrets.
The last fragment of the sunken continent?
And there are plenty of secrets on the island! The English ethnographer MacMillan Brown, in his book “Mysteries of the Pacific Ocean,” dedicated to the Pacific Ocean, paid great attention to Easter Island. In his opinion, this island was the last fragment of a sunken continent, on which cultural monuments of a vanished civilization were preserved. Brown called the island a kind of “mausoleum” for the kings and nobles who once reigned over the Pacific. In the stone idols he saw sculptural portraits of the most noble inhabitants of the continent swallowed up by water. The scientist also paid attention to the still undeciphered Kohau Rongorongo writing system that existed on the island.
Brown believed that the last fragments of the Pacific were the islands discovered by Davis, which sank between 1687 and 1722, when Roggeveen found only a small island in the area, only 22 kilometers long and 11 kilometers wide. The ethnographer believed that the catastrophe that destroyed the Pacific and sent it to the bottom of the ocean occurred suddenly. In his opinion, their continuation was under water as a result of the disaster.
The English scientist, like other supporters of the Pacifida, pointed out the presence of ruins of ancient buildings and even stone sculptures on a number of islands in Oceania. For example, quite large statues were discovered on the Marquesas Islands, somewhat reminiscent of the Easter Island statues. Even on the tiny island of Pitcairn, stone sculptures have been found. Maybe the researchers who consider the islands of Oceania to be fragments of the Pacific Ocean are right?
Island of Unsolved Mysteries
Alas, according to geologists, Easter Island has never been part of the mainland; however, once due to a volcanic eruption, part of the island sank, but it cannot be called very large. Several years ago, the famous Russian researcher Professor Ernst Muldashev visited this mysterious island with his group. He managed to make a number of interesting discoveries on the island. The scientist, for example, studied the mysterious caves of the island, in which about 60 researchers have already died. According to local residents, mysterious bird people live in these caves.
In an interview with an AiF journalist about one of these caves, Ernst Muldashev said the following:
“This cave is located on a high steep bank of the island. A pipe begins right from the cliff, going deep into the coastal hill. Its diameter is about 1.5 meters. It is noticeable from the broken parts that the walls of the pipe are made of a material similar to ceramic, gray in color, about 20 cm thick. At the places where the pipe turns, additional inserts made of the same material are visible. Incomprehensible hieroglyphs are engraved here and there on the walls of the pipe, as well as images of bird people.”
Amazingly, the natives of Easter Island could hardly have created such a pipe made of artificial material and with such parameters!
The most interesting thing is that Ernst Muldashev, who crawled into the cave, saw red glowing eyes in the depths of the pipe, then his partner screamed about numerous strange balls that literally stuck around the professor. He saw them on the screen of a digital camera. The explorers hurried to leave the cave; Having got out of it, they felt very weak and took a long time to come to their senses. The red eyes in the depths of the pipe clearly indicated that the stories about the bird people had some basis; some mysterious creatures clearly lived in the caves of the island.
According to Ernst Muldashev, there are now 887 stone idols on the island, made from volcanic tuff, and the largest of them reaches a height of 22 meters (the size of a 7-story building!) and weighs 300 tons. The researcher believes that much more stone statues were made, as evidenced by the fragments of idols lying on the island. Muldashev's observation that the pedestals of the statues, the so-called ahu, are made of very hard rock, the outcrops of which are not observed on the island, seems extremely important. So this stone was mined somewhere off the island?
Are there too many mysteries and oddities for such a small island? How did people of different skin colors end up on it, why did the islanders do a gigantic amount of work making, moving and installing huge stone statues, why did they need writing, what kind of bird-people live in the dungeons of the island? All these questions are much easier to answer if we consider that Easter Island is actually a fragment of the Pacific Islands. Or maybe that's how it is?
