ANCR-601 Lessons

Professor Wessex can be seen at the front of the room, reclining in the carved, high-backed chair behind the desk as though she has not a care in the world. Well-accustomed to her mannerisms at this point, students file in and take their seats at the tables. Mostly, they busy themselves with unpacking their various books and supplies -- Year Six is not a cakewalk, after all -- but many cast curious glances at the glossy maps and odd hunks of driftwood displayed in the dim room, illuminated only by witch-light lamps.

As the clock tolls the hour, the blonde woman in crisp robes rises to her feet, looking less nonchalant than before. If one were to look carefully, they would see a spark of excitement showing through her normally disinterested gaze, manifesting in an intense look in her eye as she regards the class.

Introduction
Welcome. I do not need to praise you, saying how hard you worked and how much skill and ability you have shown. You would not have made it here -- N.E.W.T. level Ancient Runes -- if you hadn’t. Still, congratulations are in order. Take a moment to bask in the feeling of a job well done. Unfortunately, a moment is all we have, though. Time waits for no one.

As each year of your studies in Ancient Runes has progressed, we have journeyed further into the unknown. The Elder Futhark was reconstructed by scholars several decades ago, and few mysteries remain. The Younger and Anglo-Saxon Futharks are slightly more shrouded in mystery, owing to their contested lack of magical use. Finally, hieroglyphics, in their enormous breadth, are not as well understood as we would like, and much guesswork is required to uncover the secrets of their magical use, as evidenced by the fact that we have only recently discovered the spell that activates them. This year is no different, and I should hope you find the prospect exciting.

For the next two years, there will be few cut-and-dried answers. As the most dedicated and knowledgeable students of runes in this school, I know you will be up to the challenge. For every question I am able to answer for you, two more will spring up to take its place. You should not ignore these questions. Though they may yet be unanswerable, they may well lead you to profound discoveries you could never have imagined.

Or, perhaps, they will just cause you a multitude of sleepless nights until another cracks the code first. Such is the life of a researcher. With any luck, though, you will feel the thrill of discovery no matter the outcome.

Explanation of Year and Syllabus
Our studies this year will take us to a new region of the globe, namely Asia and Oceania. If, after sitting through the entire fourth year of History of Magic you are still unfamiliar with Asia, there is not much I can do for you. However, I can shed some light on “Oceania.” This term refers to the continent of Australia along with several islands of varying sizes in the Pacific Ocean. You may also hear me refer to smaller geographical regions that make up Oceania: Australia and New Zealand, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

We will be covering three scripts this year. Two are highly related, as Elder Futhark was to its “children.” These scripts are Rongorongo, Proto-Canaanite, and Phoenician. Rongorongo is a script which originated on an island in Polynesia, whereas Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician are West Asian in origin (though they had influences from Egyptian hieroglyphs and some Asiatic scripts).

We will first be framing the year with a bit of background and history before launching into the fascinating case of Rongorongo. We will then spend the next four lessons exploring that script’s surviving texts, challenges surrounding its decipherment, the meanings as we understand them, as well as the current status of the script and accompanying language.

After our brief discussion of Rongorongo, we will then cross the Indian Ocean to visit Western Asia. We will start with a discussion about the history and background of Proto-Canaanite before talking about its wealth of extant examples and its phonetic and magical uses. Finally, we will cap off the year with a look at Phoenician, which derived from the older Proto-Canaanite. In addition to its phonetic uses, we will also touch on the newly-discovered magical uses, and in your last lesson look at what your future holds.

As you might have guessed, Asia has a large wealth of ancient magical symbols and sigils, due to the vast variety of cultures it contains. Not all societies had their own forms of script-based magic, but many did, or borrowed from other cultures. Sadly, we do not have time to cover all of them, so fascinating scripts or symbols like Kanji, Chinese oracle bones, Avestan, and Brahmi will need to wait for another day. However, should you have interest in these topics, you will have the opportunity to explore them before the end of your Ancient Runes career at Hogwarts.

Standing opposite to Asia’s surplus of magical signs, in Oceania ancient scripts were more or less non-existent, with the entire continent of Australia being a prime example. While there exist hundreds of spoken aboriginal languages (and magical practices), textual systems to accompany those languages were simply never developed, with the native peoples preferring to rely on oral communication and traditions. Fortunately, this situation is not true for all cultures and countries in the greater region of Oceania, as you will see in just a moment. However, it does help explain the potentially unexpected lack of vibrant script-based magic in this area.

An Island By Many Names
The first script we are studying this year, along with the island it originates from, is steeped in mystery. It is home to the strange statues of enormous human heads (moai), the odd “birdman” cult, and many unexplained questions about the origins of its script. Regarding the script -- the mystery with which we are primarily concerned -- we do know a few things. It sprang up as one of the few forms of independent writing; the vast majority of languages, both written and spoken, are highly interrelated and had significant influence on each other’s development, as you will see in the second half of this year. Rongorongo was afforded a unique opportunity away from all of this language contact, as it was developed on an island, far away from large civilizations.

You may know this island by the moniker “Easter Island,” but this is just one of many titles in various languages. The Spanish-speaking world refers to this location as “La Isla de Pascua,” and both this and the Western name are translations of each other. As this island is part of Chile -- at least in the political, if not geographical sense -- this is the name by which it is most often known. However, among its native inhabitants it is called “Rapa Nui.” These native inhabitants are the users (or the descendents of users) of our script, Rongorongo, and the corresponding language, Rapanui.

Challenges
As I have already hinted, but will continue to reinforce, very little is known about this island, the people, their language and script, and their culture prior to the first contact with Europeans in the late 1600s. While these meetings were documented rather well for the time, they simply cannot make up for missing what is potentially thousands of years of history. Therefore, it is unknown for certain when both the language and the script developed. Much of the difficulty comes into play based on the lack of written history. Very few inhabitants of Rapa Nui were literate, as is common in ancient societies, and therefore they strongly favored oral traditions. Their history was recorded alongside fabricated myth, and while these myths likely had more than one kernel of truth, at this point it is near impossible to distinguish fact from fiction, or history from mythology, even by native inhabitants.

Secondly, as I will detail more thoroughly later on, the entire native magical population of Rapa Nui was, at one point, completely wiped out. Therefore knowledge of the old script and magic is “second-hand,” and even the ancestors of the original inhabitants have been forced to re-discover it as outsiders, as they are slowly attempting to do.

Lastly, due to the unique material upon which Rongorongo was inscribed, and the fact that the entire island was deforested and ecologically devastated, only 26 reputable texts in the script have survived. Worse, many of them are falsified to varying degrees or in some way inauthentic. Due to the devastating loss of magical knowledge on the island, it is difficult to tell which are which. Even one of these factors would be enough to cause a problem in academic studies, and we are faced with the entire host. Still, what has been able to be pieced together is useful, and the product of much blood, sweat, and rebounded magic.

Alpha-Basics
The script is composed of many glyphs. Irritatingly, it is contested how many there are. Most recent studies put the number around 600, but others have proposed numbers in the thousands. The difficulty in putting an exact number to the script lies in the fact that its meaning is not entirely understood. Researchers are unsure which glyphs are merely variants or ligatures, and which glyphs are completely new signs. For the purpose of this course, you may assume that the Muggle anthropologist, Thomas Barthel, is correct in his estimation of 600 glyphs, as this is the most commonly accepted figure.

However, 600 is not the most useful figure. Of these 600, only 52 are used with any regularity, and are considered to be the “core” glyphs (though other non-magical anthropologists claim the core is made up of 120 key glyphs instead). Regardless of who is right or wrong -- something we will examine later -- the fact remains that those 52 glyphs make up 99% of the inscriptions on the surviving texts (with the exception of one odd text). This has been proposed to mean that the majority of the remaining 548 glyphs are less common words, syllables, sounds, ideograms, or magical instructions.

In terms of organization, the script was written in a unique style and direction known as reverse boustrophedon. This style of writing is not to be confused with the more general regular boustrophedon which is more popular (and we will also see this year). In reverse boustrophedon, the reader begins at the bottom left, reading across to the end of the line. Then, the reader must flip the text upside down and repeat the process, but reversed: start from the same side and read across to the new “right.” Once this line is done, the process repeats until the inscription is finished, or there is no more tablet. The writing on the board should clear up any lingering doubt on exactly what this looks like. The text also had the very interesting feature of creating its own borders. Each line of text was actually surrounded by carvings that served to outline the text, much like lined paper. You will see just what this looks like when we examine some of the surviving texts in upcoming weeks, so suffice it to say for the moment that it produced a very unique effect.

                                  
Now, the meaning. Again, there are not as many answers as you or I would like, but we do know this: the script has both magical and non-magical functions. Yes, I am aware just how vague a statement that is. The specifics of the magical uses are highly difficult to pinpoint, for reasons I will go into in Lesson Four, but we do know they are magical. With extensive testing and study, more detailed uses and meanings will inevitably be uncovered, and some already have been, in whole or in part.

The non-magical meanings are far less clear, as there are no residual effects to test. To put it in overly simplistic terms, we can (but should not) drop a text off of a cliff to see if it bounces, and that will tell us if it has been magically imbued to bounce. However, we cannot do the same to determine if glyph 12 means [a] instead of [k], or if it is a logograph versus a pictograph. It is much more difficult to test linguistic hypotheses. Because of this, the magical community relies heavily on the Muggle world for their insight into potential non-magical meanings. Truthfully, we have enough on our hands attempting to unravel the magical mysteries.

Until new evidence is found or more compelling theories are proposed, the majority of the magical community is in agreement with a pair of non-magical Russian anthropologists -- Nikolai Butinov and Yuri Knorozov -- that the script does not have phonetic meanings, but instead is completely ideographic and logographic. In essence, we believe that each glyph meant something different, though the “something” could be a wide variety of things such as kings’ names, plants, animals, actions, etc. This would lend itself to the idea that the script was largely magical, as ideograms have great magical potency.

There are, of course, other theories. Muggles and magical persons alike suggest that the script may be syllabic (each glyph being assigned a syllable). There is some credence to this argument as the surviving texts are very recent (in comparison to what we suspect is the true age of the script), and the script could have easily undergone various transitions like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, starting out one way and gradually morphing into something else. You will be able to start forming your own opinions on the matter once I provide you the necessary resources and meanings that the magical academic world currently uses.

Humble Beginnings and Endings
As you might imagine, Rongorongo has never been able to be dated back to an official start point. It was not recorded in the oral histories and cannot truly be pinpointed with the knowledge we currently have. Instead, archaeologists (and magiarchaeologists) have dated the materials on which Rongorongo have been written. By approximate counts, the script must at least date back to the mid-1600s, as some of the signs, and even the material that some texts are written on, refer to trees that would have been extinct well before that point. However, this is very limited evidence that only narrows down the window slightly, as there is the possibility that the script could be far more ancient than the most generous number derived from these facts. That is to say that the time indicated by these facts is the latest possible date of origin.

Overall, Muggle scientists, linguists, and historians agree that the script likely began around the 1400s based on the above information. Magianthropologists and magiarchaeologists have a different view, though. The very ritualized magical information the script provides matches up with a much more ancient magical civilization, not one that was around in the early Renaissance or late Middle Ages. That, coupled with the high number of glyph variants used among such a small population (remember, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were used throughout a diverse kingdom whereas Rongorongo was relegated to a small island), suggest many hundreds of years of development and differentiation, though there are no concrete facts to prove this theory or provide even a rough date.

It is for this reason that Rongorongo is categorized as an ancient magical script -- remember our discussion last year about the meaning behind that term -- as it is a) both likely to be far older than the non-magical community supposes, and b) behaves much like an ancient script with its length, ritual and formal nature, and relation to religion.

Sadly, the ending of Rongorongo is easier to pinpoint. For reasons we will get into more next week, the entire magical and literate population was eradicated from the island somewhere between 1862 and 1864, and the knowledge of both magical uses and its non-magical meanings were lost. While it is possible that some of the existing texts were actually produced after this point, these would have been copies of original works or simply strings of remembered symbols that had no meaning to the author.

Closing
Not a particularly cheerful tale, but I assure you, it gets worse. I will see you all in the coming week to discuss the cultural background of the users of Rongorongo in an attempt to understand its possible uses. For now, you have a quiz to ensure that you understand the basics of this confusing topic and an essay as a review of a few key terms. Additionally, there will be two extra credit assignments: one surrounding the terms reverse boustrophedon and regular boustrophedon, and another in which you can show your understanding of the workings of scripts and explain exactly why it is incredibly unlikely that Rongorongo has phonetic meanings.

Original lesson written by Professor Venita Wessex
Image credits here, here, and here