Easter Island lies some two thousand miles off the coast of Chile, in the Pacific Ocean. When they were first discovered
in 1722, the Easter Islanders were found worshipping giant statues that had been set up all over the island.
These strange statues were set up on the shore, and faced inland. Other statues were erected around the slopes of the volcanic crater. In size, the statues vary from four high to twenty feet in height. Carved from volcanic lava, the statues weigh upto fifty tons. Interestingly, the features of all these statues are alike – they have long faces with sunken eyes! Who were the people who raised these statues, and worshipped them as gods?
The Easter Islanders
believed in their god Make Make, the creator of the birds. The figure of the bird man and the sacred egg have special significance in the Polynesian
religion. Their myths and traditions were handed down in carved tablets of wood.
Their religion was common to that found in most of Polynesia – they believed in Father Sky and Mother Earth. They believed that their living chiefs (and their gods) were descended from the Sky and the Earth, and derived their powers from them.
Tragically, because of depopulation (caused by a devastastating civil war) and conquest, their culture was almost entirely wiped out shortly after they were discovered. And the keys to their language have been lost along with them.
The script used by the Easter Island people shows a great similarity with the script of the Indus Valley people, although they are separated by thousands of miles. This indicates an unsuspected link between the Old World and the New World; and seems to suggest that Easter Island was not settled from the American continent, as had been assumed because of the direction of the flow of the Pacific currents.
It remains one of the unsolved mysteries of history how (and why) the Indus Valley people could have crossed thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean to establish settlements on Easter Island, and possibly along the coast of Peru.