Easter Island - Rapa Nui

Easter Island 2010. You can see more at gotoslawek.org
The name "Easter Island" was given by the island's first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island and named it Paasch-Eyland (18th century Dutch for "Easter Island").[5] The island's official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, also means "Easter Island".

The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" or "Big Rapa", was coined following the slave raids carried out in Rapa Nui in the early 1860s because of Easter Island's geographic resemblance to the island of Rapa in the Bass Islands of the Austral Islands group.[6] However, Thor Heyerdahl has argued that the naming would have been the opposite, Rapa being the original name of Easter Island, and Rapa Iti was named by its refugees.[7]

There are several hypotheses about the "original" Polynesian name for Easter Island, including Te pito o te henua, meaning "The Navel of the land" or "The ends of the land". Pito means both navel and umbilical cord which was considered to be the link between the world of the living (kainga) and the spiritworld Po, lying in the depths of the ocean further East. Since Easter Island is the easternmost Polynesian island it's possible the name refers to it being the "ends" of the world of the living; however after Alphonse Pinart translated it as "the Navel of the World" in his Voyage a l'Ile de Paques published in 1877, this second meaning has been lost. According to some oral traditions, the island was first named Te pito o te kainga a Hau Maka, or the "Little piece of land of Hau Maka".[8] Another name, Mata-ki-Te-rangi, means "Eyes looking to the sky."

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