what is Pascuan literature?

Eastern Island (Rapa Nui) guards its secrets, in more than one way. Certainly, the origin and meaning of the mysterious figures staring upon the sea is the most famous of its mysteries. Yet another is the system of writing, or proto-writing, called rongorongo. In spite of many attempts, it had never been deciphered. The texts appear on pieces of wood, as well as short inscriptions carved in stones. The glyphs follow lines written in alternating directions, forming a boustrophedon. It is generally assumed that the language represented must be the Rapanui (the Pascuan), a tongue belonging to the Austronesian family (together with the Marquesic and the Tahitic languages). But this art of writing seems to be irretrievably lost before 1860; also, the existing inscriptions (24 wooden tablets) have been taken away from the island and remain scattered in different collections around the world. On the other hand, oral tradition indicates that those artefacts have been extremely rare since the very beginning: the legendary founders of Rapa Nui, Hotu Matu'a and/or Tu'u ko Iho brought only 67 tablets from their original, unidentified homeland. The broken link of cultural transmission may thus be motivated also by the fact that the writing was treated as an apanage of a narrow class of priests-scribes, and the texts were guarded in special houses and treated as tapu (taboo), i.e. something so sacred that its use had to be severely restricted.
Overall, the population of the island counts only some thousand people; the written literature that is usually associated with Easter Island has thus been predominantly created by foreigners, such as early voyagers and explorers, such as Cook, Roggeveen (in the 18th c.), Choris, Beechey (in the 19th c.), etc. 

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