International Journal of Arts and Humanities (IJAH)

This paper demonstrates that the Hawaiian petroglyphs are an incipient level of pictographic writing with reference to Native American pictography, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese and Japanese logography, and rongorongo. Ethnographic data show a developmental sequence from pictograph to logograph, then syllabography after the rebus principle is used to create phonetic elements. Representations of events from prehistory, such as the pictograph of the decapitated Kamalalawalu in Hawai`i, can be understood as pictographic writing by ethnographic analogy to indigenous peoples of the New World. Copperplate lettering is important evidence because Native Hawaiians committed it to lava rock in the same manner and spatial distribution as the petroglyphs themselves.