In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy was the first academic to suggest a link between Rongorongo(Easter Island) and the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. For a while, the idea was entertained and debated until radiocarbon dating of the Indus Valley culture was placed between c. 3,300 – 1,900 BC , a finding which officially separated the two cultures by over 2,000 years. Recent research however, has opened the debate again as the finding of Indus Valley DNA in Australian Aborigines suggest a contact between the two cultures c. 2,000 BC.

‘A recent study by Irina Pugach of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, and her colleagues, which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has apparently resolved the matter. About 4,000 years before Europeans arrived, it seems that a group of Indian adventurers (from the same time as the great Indus Valley Civilisation) chose to call the place home. Unlike their European successors, these earlier settlers were assimilated by the locals. And they brought with them both technological improvements and one of Australia’s most iconic animals, the Dingo’.

Perhaps no coincidence that studies in language evolution have shown that the navigation and settlement of the Pacific began at the same time and in the same region, continuing from west to east finally reaching Easter Island approximately c. 1,000 BC.

‘The settlement of the Pacific proceeded in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses. The Austronesians arose in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Before entering the Philippines, they paused for around a thousand years, and then spread rapidly across the 7,000 km from the Philippines to Polynesia in less than one thousand years. After settling Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, the Austronesians paused again for another thousand years, before finally spreading further into Polynesia eventually reaching as far as New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island’.

The continued navigation and colonisation of the Pacific Islands from this time onwards offers the possibility of a continuation of the traditions of a ‘sacred’ script. Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Chinese logograms and Sumerian cuneiform are all testimony to the longevity of language. In ancient times, many scripts were considered sacred such as the Hebraic Torah still is today. These ‘sacred’ texts were transferred meticulously without deviation for millennia. This theory is supported by the discovery of repeated script on more than one of the few surviving Rongorongo tablets.

In addition, recent epigraphic research have revealed both further similarities between the two scripts but also, and more significantly, that similarities between groupings of characters can be found in both scripts. A finding which cannot be ignored or considered simply a further coincidence. We are left with a mystery which however unlikely, appears to show a thread of connection between the two cultures.

Although the translation of the Harappan script is still very much a work in progress, there are numerous indications that Harappans were well versed in astronomy.

The straight streets of the Indus cities are oriented towards the cardinal directions, which presupposes astronomical observations and the use of the sun-stick, the Gnomon.

The star-calendar used by the Vedic ritualists was adopted by the Ancient Indians.On the other hand, astronomical evidence dates the compilation of this calendar at around the 23rd century B.C., when the Indus civilization flourished at its peak. Like other urban civilizations, it undoubtedly needed a calendar that adjusted the lunar and the solar time-reckoning.

Linkages between ancient Harappan scripts and latter Vedic texts suggest that Harappan priest-astronomers tracked progress of Mercury, Venus and Saturn, and most likely all of the planets. They also appeared to have mapped the sky and star constellations. Some of the pieces of recovered tablets show what appears to be a discussion of the North Star in one case and the star cluster, Pleides, in another.

Two magnificent wide shell bangles, each made from a single conch shell (Turbinella pyrum) found at Harappa. “The use of marine shell in the manufacture of ornaments and ritual objects provides one of the most striking examples of the continuity between the Indus cities and later cultures in South Asia. Along the coastal regions of Makran, Kutch and Gujarat, the conch shell or Turbinella pyrum was collected throughout the period following the decline of Indus cities. Later, with the rise of cities in the northern sub-continent this marine shell became common at inland sites in the Gangetic region as far north as Taxila. As Mauryan contacts expanded to the south, some shell may have been collected from South Indian waters and traded to workshops throughout penninsular India.” (Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities, p. 182).-Harappa.com

The Discovery of the ancient Indus Civilization actually was announced in a tabloid, the pictorial weekly The Illustrated London News on September 20, 1924