Gold plated Pandora Shine collection. The secrets of Easter Island have been solved: Scientific confirmation of the reality of Easter Island, a mystery of history.

Everyone knows about Easter Island. Started in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean
a piece of volcanic land was discovered on April 6, 1722 by a Dutchman
Admiral J. Roggeveen. The admiral and his men stayed on the island for only a day.
They were warmly greeted by tall, dark-skinned residents who looked like Polynesians,
among whom the Dutch were surprised to see natives with almost black,
reddish and even completely white skin. The representative of the local leadership who visited the ship also had a completely European appearance and behaved with
great dignity and differed from sailors only in exotic
savage attire and long earlobes hanging down to the shoulders, in
which had some heavy white decorations inserted into them. Unseen in
Many people sported magnificent tattoos and the same ears here. But more
In total, the Dutch were amazed by the huge stone statues of a peculiar appearance, in
numerous towering on the shore - how the natives were able to move here,
it was completely unclear. Upon closer examination, Roggeveen, who was clearly not particularly observant, decided that everything was explained extremely simply and that the idols were molded on the spot from clay, in which cobblestones were interspersed for beauty and durability. In front of some of them, the islanders lit fires and respectfully raised and lowered their clasped hands. The next morning, the travelers saw how the natives, surrounded by hundreds of fires, prayed to the rising luminary. Once again marveling at the customs and wonders of this amazing island, Roggeveen set out to further search for Southern terra incognita.

At first, someone who comes here sees just a slope overgrown with grass and black
gray rocks. Some time later he discovers that the cut
the grooves of the rock through which he has been climbing all this time, not just rocks
and that he is now, for example, standing on someone’s vast sunken chest, and
nearby, in the thickets of ferns, one can see emerging from the thickness of a stone
a characteristic profile with a characteristic nose and tightly pursed thin lips.
Gradually, the researcher begins to distinguish the surrounding forms and feel like a mouse who decided to walk through an empty house and was caught by the owners who appeared from nowhere. But there is no need to be afraid. Unknown forces hundreds of years ago plunged these giants into a deep sleep. Something happened here shortly before the Europeans arrived. There are also broken statues. There are also those who did not finish due to failure
located xenolith of trachybasalt, not amenable to processing with axes
from the same material. The body of one unfinished moai and the rock from which
it has not yet been separated, a crack crosses it - a trace of what happened already in
historical time of the earthquake. But still most of the statues were not there
ended for some other reason. Thousands of stone axes were thrown at
cradles of unborn giants. Some are ready, completely
polished sculptures lie on a slope - they were obviously lowered down the slope towards the plain, but for some reason they were also abandoned to their fate. There seems to be a clear sense of disaster hanging in the air itself, which forced all work to suddenly stop. Some moai - those that were overgrown with lichen - have already died. That's what the islanders say, anyway.

On the small Easter Island, lost in the vast expanses of the ocean, there are huge stone statues on the mountainside. With incomprehensible calm they look at the sea and the land, and their mysterious contours, despite their simplicity, begin to attract, bewitch, and bewitch you. The more you indulge in such contemplation, the stronger this feeling becomes - a feeling of calm nobility, charm and mystery.

The whole picture is especially powerful at sunset, when the huge black silhouettes of the monuments, illuminated by the fading rays of the sun, gradually stretch out against the magnificent iridescent background of the horizon.

Archaeologists and ethnographers describe Easter Island and its mysterious statues differently. But even looking at the photographs, you are amazed by the stone giants erected on this tiny piece of land. According to the most recent data, there are now about 900 statues left on the island, the average weight of which reaches several tons. All of them have been explored, studied, measured, but scientists still cannot give an exact answer to almost any question: when were these stone idols, reaching 20 meters in height, erected? Who do they depict - living people, unknown gods or powerful spirits? How did they manage to carve these giant figures out of stone and who was able to drag them several kilometers to the seashore in order to install them on the huge “ahu” platforms? Why was it necessary to carve huge cylinders of red stone (caps) elsewhere on the island and place them on the heads of the statues?

There are many unresolved issues. There is no definite information about the time of settlement of the island. The current name of the island was given by the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen when he discovered it in 1772; the Indians themselves call their island Rapa Nui.

Some scientists call it the Pacific Atlantis: once the island split, and one part of it went under water. In calm weather, the flooded areas are clearly visible, but the time of the cataclysm has not yet been determined. The first settlers of the island could have been Polynesians, ancient Peruvians, and even tribes from Southeast Asia. Professor A. Metro, who led the Franco-Belgian expedition to this island in 1934-1935, believed that the first inhabitants, led by the legendary leader Hotu Matua, arrived here in the 12th-13th centuries.

Linguist S. Englert dates the settlement of the island to even more recent times, and the construction of giant statues (in his opinion) began in the 17th century, almost on the eve of the discovery of the island by Europeans. The famous Thor Heyerdahl believes that the island was inhabited already in the 5th-6th centuries and the Indians from America were the first to arrive here. During the expedition, the scientist was primarily attracted by the monumental statues (moai), and gradually he came to the conclusion that this region represents the heritage of white bearded people. At the same time, T. Heyerdahl referred to the vague statements of some Incas: “And the local residents said that the huge, now abandoned monuments were erected by the white gods who lived here before the Incas took power into their own hands.” However, the risky voyage of the courageous Norwegian did not convince other scientists that the inhabitants of Polynesia and their culture originated from ancient Peru, and specifically from Tiahuanaco.

There are many more different versions. For example, adherents of some mystical sects believe that the ancestral home of humanity - the continent of Lemuria - died 4 million years ago, and Easter Island is its remnant. And Eric Däniken continues to stubbornly assert that the natives are the descendants of aliens.

The famous captain James Cook in 1774 saw (and was very surprised!) that the islanders were poor fishermen and had wicker boats, although the inhabitants of other islands had long been building dugouts. They lived in caves and did not even suspect that there were many other islands in the sea. They could not explain the purpose of their stone idols.

If Easter Island had had a genealogy of rulers like those recorded on the other Polynesian islands, many of its secrets would have long been revealed. So who exactly do these stone idols represent? For what purpose did the islanders carve them?

Jacob Roggeveen called statues idols. In his ship's log, he wrote: “As for their worship... we only noticed that they lit a fire in front of very tall stone statues and squatted in front of them, bowing their heads. And then they folded their hands and swung them up and down... "On the head of each statue stood a basket filled with white-painted stones."

James Cook recorded that the statues were erected by local people to honor the buried rulers or chiefs of the island, and other researchers believe that the Easter Island giants marked the boundaries of sea and land. They are a kind of ritual "guardians" who prevent invasion from the sea. There was an opinion that there were also statues that served as boundary posts, marking the boundaries of the possessions of different clans, clans, and tribes.

Despite the hypotheses, secrets and riddles, it is now possible to guess how it all happened. The mountain was the only place where these stone idols were built, or rather, they were cut out of the same mountain. The technology for “producing” giants was so primitive that it is simply impossible to talk about their unearthly origin.

In the crater of the Rano Raraku volcano you can see all the stages of work on the stone giants. First, the general outline of the statue was outlined. After this, the “sculptors” began creating the face and front part of the body, then moving on to the sides of the statue, finishing the long ears and hands with elongated fingers folded on the stomach. Following this, the rock was removed from all sides of the statue and only in the lower part of the back was a connection (like a stone keel) with the mother mountain - the Rano Raraku volcano - preserved.

Perhaps the entire statue was made in a quarry. Perhaps the processing of the back and the back of the head took place only when the statue was lowered down to the foot of the volcano. Here symbolic signs were applied to the back of the statue, such as a belt with rings, a bird-man, etc. And only when the stone giant was mounted on the “ahu” and crowned with a “hat”, the last detail of the statue was carved out - the eyes, indicated by elliptical concave contours.

The idols were carved not one at a time, but in series. To make full use of the quarry, the “sculptors” carved out the sculptures, placing them on top of each other, using literally all the possibilities of the material. They carved them in profile, and obliquely, and even upside down. Ancient sculptors did not need to cut down the monolith, because there was no monolith. They were excellent at identifying cracks and used them to make their work easier. Sometimes, between two cracks cutting through a series of volcanic layers, up to 8-12 statues of equal height and width were cut down. They differed only in thickness.

There are also many unfinished statues left in the quarry. Maybe the work was stopped for some reason? Or were these “defective” and not “unfinished” statues? While working, the sculptors could have stumbled upon a large block that they simply could not process with their tools. And there was plenty of stone around, and unfinished moai remained in the quarry. On the island you can see whole “woodpiles” of such statues.

Almost all studies about Easter Island speak of the fantastic size of the statues and their extreme heaviness. Thor Heyerdahl compares the statues to the weight of ten railway cars and asks, puzzled, “How did they manage all this long before the era of technology?” And he doesn't give an answer...

The largest statues reach a weight of 20 tons. Their movement is incomparably difficult, if you remember that the surface of the island is cracked lava. A great many assumptions have been made regarding the transportation of stone sculptures, some of which are curious or simply delusional, others are difficult to accept. But still, the statues somehow moved from the quarry on the slopes of the Rano Raraku volcano to their ahu pedestals, often many kilometers away. And the first Europeans, who began to look here in 1722, found most of the moai overturned. Each of these questions gives rise to many versions, and not the least of them is “cosmic” - the myth about omnipotent aliens who created the moai in their own image and likeness, long before the ancestors of its current inhabitants appeared on the island. There is also an opinion about the supernatural power of “mana”, possessing which the leaders of local tribes moved the moai contrary to the laws of gravity.

You can assume anything, but in the face of a 22-meter finished statue (the height of a 7-story building), no logic can stand. The head and neck of the statue are 7 meters high and 3 meters in diameter, the length of the nose is more than 3 meters, the height of the body is 13 meters, and the weight is 50 tons! Even today there are not very many cranes in the world to cope with such a colossus.

The Easter Island statues continue to surprise, delight, and make you wonder: who, how and why made them? Various guesses give rise not only to hypotheses, but also to myths, but not the ancient myths and legends of the islanders, but the real “myths from science.” Some scientists believe that the statues were built by free people who were happy to work together. Others, on the contrary, suggest that an army of thousands of slaves, like the one that built the Egyptian pyramids, worked to create these giants. It is believed that the construction of one statue took from one to four months. The time factor had no meaning on the island. Mobilizing a large number of people to create the moai and deliver it to the platform was also not difficult. They paid for the services of the “sculptors” and workers in food; there was no money for Rapa Nui.

But the stone idol has been hewn, it must be separated from the rock... How? The statue was separated from the rock of which it was a part, using ordinary stones and patiently cutting down a layer of basalt. Then the statue was raised using levers and ropes, placing small stones under it each time it was lifted from the ground. The ancient islanders did not use any metal tools.

But they were still moved! In the light of theology and tectonics, it is likely that the statues moved along the mountainside by themselves under the influence of microseismic movements of the soil, due to its trembling, until they slipped to the place prepared for them. There is another version: the statues were lowered down along a pre-prepared earthen trench (hence the name of the volcano Rano Raraku - “Ribbed with trenches”). But these are just hypotheses and assumptions. And the islanders themselves, like two hundred years ago, unanimously claim that the moai statues moved on their own, with the help of the magical power of “mana”... And from the basalt pedestals, like many centuries ago, they good-naturedly squint at the fantastically mysterious statues with their coral eyes .

\from the internet\

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 off the coast of Chile, 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 (100 people in total!) 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?

Why are there so many mysteries associated with Easter Island? With a small island that is lost in the Pacific Ocean, to which you can’t swim. With an island once inhabited by savage aboriginals, not alien to cannibalism during a certain historical period? Maybe due to its name, which it received in 1722, on Easter Sunday, when it was discovered for Europeans by the Dutch navigator Roggeveen? Or is this due to the giant statues looking into the depths of the island with stone eyes? Who knows... But its mysteries are being solved to this day, and there are still many of them left, there is something to puzzle over....

The real name of the island is Rapa Nui. Now it is part of the Republic of Chile and its area is 165 sq. km. It is located in the Southeast part of the Pacific Ocean and is 3590 km away from the nearest coast of South America. There is only one settlement on the island, which is its capital - Hanga Roa. There is a small port and airfield where airliners fly from Chile. There is also a runway specially prepared by NASA for a possible emergency shuttle landing. The population today is about 6,000 people. Easter Island is included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Rapa Nui is of volcanic origin and has the shape of a right triangle, with its hypotenuse facing the South-West. At each corner of this triangle rises a crater from an extinct volcano, filled with water. The Terevak crater is the highest of them. There are no trees on the island. But once they existed and formed entire forests. Possible reasons for the disappearance of forests are different - this is, as they say now, “ineffective economic activity”, and long-term drought. Trees disappeared and, as a result, the soil became impoverished, which led to a significant reduction in population. More fertile soils are found in the interior of the craters, where reeds grow, and in the north of the island, where sweet potatoes and yams are grown. Rainwater quickly goes underground, forming underground rivers that carry it into the ocean. Sources of fresh water are lakes in volcanic craters, reservoirs and wells.

Basalt, rhyolite, obsidian, trachyte are the main rocks, and the sheer cliffs in Hanga Hoonu Bay are made of red lava.The warmest month of the year is January, the coldest is August. The climate is tropical, warm but not hot. This is due to the proximity of the cold Humboldt Current and the lack of land between Easter Island and Antarctica.

Presumably, the island was first discovered by Europeans in 1687, when the shores of the “mysterious land” were observed from the ship of the English privateer Edward Davis. This event was described by the doctor Lionel Wafer, who was on board. But the coordinates were not recorded accurately, the crew did not land on shore, and the ship passed by due to the fact that it was being pursued by the Spaniards. Therefore, it is officially believed that the island was discovered in 1722 by the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen. Since this happened on Easter Sunday, April 5, this is where the name came from - Easter Island. Roggeveen described in detail the inhabitants of the island; he was greatly impressed by the huge statues discovered on the coast. Local residents reacted extremely belligerently to the arrival of strangers, a skirmish occurred, during which nine Rapanui people were killed.

The next mention of Rapa Nui dates back to 1774. This year, a Spanish ship under the command of Captain Felipe Gonzalez de Aedo arrived on the island. The Spanish colonial administration, located in Peru, intended to include these lands as part of the South American colonies. Apparently not having found anything remarkable on the island, especially gold, so beloved by the conquistadors, the Spaniards soon forgot about Rapa Nui and never claimed rights to it again. But travelers and sailors did not forget about him. At different times the island was visited by:James Cook (12 March 1774)Jean François La Perouse (1787),Yuri Fedorovich Lisyansky on the sloop "Neva" (1804),Otto Evstafievich Kotzebue on the brig "Rurik" (1816).

1862 was one of the most tragic years in the history of the island. Slave traders from Peru landed in Anga Roa Bay. About 1,500 Rapanui were captured and sold into slavery, including all those who could read kohau rongorongo. Kohau rongorongo are wooden tablets with writing in the local language. Only the intervention of the French government and the Bishop of Tahiti, Florenty Etienne Jossan, who appealed to the Peruvian government, allowed the 15 surviving islanders to return home. They introduced smallpox, and as a result of the epidemic, by 1877 the population was reduced to 111 people. There was not a single person left who owned writing and could read rongorongo. The writing of the inhabitants of Easter Island has not yet been solved. There is no consensus among linguists even in determining its type, not to mention reading the tablets.

Serious scientific research on the island began to be carried out only in the 20th century. The Norwegian scientist Thor Heyerdahl left a special mark on the study of the culture and history of Rapa Nui. First of all, it was about when and where the population came from. To answer these questionsan expedition was organized in 1955-1956. A series of archaeological excavations were carried out, and with the help of local residents, a full-scale experiment was carried out to carve a moai statue from a rock and move it to the coast. After the expedition, a large number of scientific materials were published, which provided answers to some questions related to the island. Based on excavation data and radiocarbon dating, Heyerdahl hypothesized that the first inhabitants arrived on Rapa Nui in the 6th century from ancient Peru, and settlers from the Polynesian islands arrived much later. This theory is also supported by the fact that the stone statues on the island are very similar to the figurines found in the Andes, as well as some external similarity between the Rapanui writing and the writing of the Kuna Indians. There are other theories of the settlement of the island, in particular Melanesian and Polynesian. Each theory is based on certain historical and scientific facts and has both followers and opponents in the scientific community. In general, this is another the mystery of easter island, which is yet to be unraveled.

Of course, not only Thor Heyerdahl was involved in research. Scientists from Russia, Britain, France, Belgium, the USA - Routledge, Lavacherie, Metro, Englert, Shapiro, Butinov - studied not only history, life, culture, but also tried to solve the main mystery - the Moai statues.What are these statues? This is the head and part of the torso up to the waist, carved from a single piece of rock. They all look deep into the island. Some remained unfinished and have been in the quarries since time immemorial. What Easter Island statues this is part of some kind of cult, an object for worship - there is no doubt. But how did they get to the coast, because they were made in the depths of the island, in quarries. There is a legend that they moved independently. The people of Rapa Nui even have a word for this, which literally translates to "move slowly", defining the movement of the Moai. Moai- huge. Their height is from 4 to 20 meters, weight - from 20 to 90 tons. Non-fast people have a red cap on their head. There are several versions about how they were delivered to the coast. According to the first version, they used wooden sleds; according to the second, round stones were placed under the statues.

What is modern Easter Island like? This is a completely civilized island with satellite communications and the Internet, where adults work and children study. Teaching in schools is conducted in two languages: Rapa Nui and Spanish. There are hospitals, clinics, shops and hotels. There is a large library and an anthropological museum. There is also a Church.

Now Easter Island is also a center of tourism. Tourists do not ignore it. It’s a pity that it is impossible to get higher education on the island. For this purpose, young people go to the mainland.

Every year on Easter Island the Tapati festival is held, quite spectacular and somewhat unique, where traditional Rapanui competitions are always held.

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, who called 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 relief 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 following 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.

Our beloved company Pandora presented a very interesting and unusual “Pandora Shine” series this spring. "Pandora Shine" is a new line of jewelry that features 925 sterling silver and 18k gold plating.

This collection was created as part of Pandora Spring 2018. More spring-themed 2018 Mother's Day decorations arrived in April. And you can see all these decorations on the website.

"Pandora Shine" - new Pandora line

Pandora Shine is the first new line from Pandora since the launch of the Pandora Rose collection back in 2014. The Pandora company has invested a lot of effort and resources to create it and to satisfy the taste of even the most demanding client. As mentioned above, this collection was released with real gold plating, which reaches 18 carats. Because of this coating, jewelry looks very expensive, shiny and luxurious. The company also presented sets of jewelry, since this is a new collection and it is almost impossible to match a product from the previous collection to this rich yellow color. But she presented a wide selection of new jewelry to suit every taste and style. The theme of the collection consists of spring motifs, namely bees, honey and honeycombs. Pandora charms, bracelets, earrings, pendants and rings are exclusively available in these styles. You will not find a product that does not resemble this theme. All products are engraved with honeycombs and some of them are decorated with zirconium stones.