The Origin of the Polynesians

Hugh Young - 1 August 2018

By Cedric Livingstone

Reviewed by Hugh Young

Unorthodox claims about the origin of the Māori go way back. Co-founder of the Polynesian Society and erratic polymath Edward Tregear claimed in 1885 they were “Aryan”, based on such unlikely things as the similarity between waiū (milk: from wai, water and ū, the breast) and whey (Old English hwǣg). What follows is even less persuasive.

The booklet describes itself as an “[a]rticle written for universities and museums detailing the origin and route Polynesians used on their journey to the Pacific – particularly New Zealand” and the author as “Tapu … Keeper of the Secrets”. It is clear we are not in for an academic treatise with references or argument rebutting previous studies of Polynesian origins. (The modern consensus is that they came via Taiwan.)

It begins with a narrative about the author’s childhood, and how, as a Pākehā, he was made tapu by kaumatua at Pōrangahau marae. He returns to this claim several times, though it is irrelevant to his main theme.

His main theme is a rambling attempt to show that Māori originated on the South African veldt, travelled to Madagascar and then branched out to Egypt and the Pacific. He identifies Akhenaten’s wife Kiya (Kiw, Kia, Kaia) with an African woman of unknown provenance called Kea, and both with the name of the New Zealand alpine parrot Nestor notabilis (which, like most New Zealand birds’ names, is onomatapoeic – based on its cry).

This is justified mainly by similarities between words in Māori, African and Egyptian languages, and images from the various cultures. All of these can readily be explained as human universals and coincidence. Polynesian striped collars somewhat resemble Egyptian striped collars – mainly because they have to go around similarly shaped necks. Kenyan textiles and Maori tukutuku both feature zigzag patterns because they are constrained by the weaving process. The Egyptians and the Māori both called the sun Ra/Rā. As an archaeologist said the last time this hypothesis came up, in 1970, “Yes, and they both called their mothers ‘Ma’.” It is easy to find, in the lexicons of any two unrelated languages, a handful of words that resemble each other; “te” and “the”, “whā” and “four”, for example.

These are among the claims made without evidence:

“Pre European Maori practiced mummification of their dead”

“Egyptian [language] is the same to Maori, as Latin is to English.”

“Prefixes such as ti, te, ta, ha, ka, ra, pa, and ma all come from Egypt, or are found in Egypt.” (A rather significant difference.)

“The Maori language is a mix of, native South African, Egyptian and Madagascan Creole.” (It is not clear what language the last refers to. The national language of Madagascar is Malagasy, an Austronesian language and therefore distantly related to Māori. It is not a creole, a hybrid language.)

“There have been people living in New Zealand for 3000 years.”

“The Maori myth of Maui pushing the earth and sky apart is an adaptation of the … Egyptian legend/myth – much simplified and changed but the basics are still the same – that is the earth and sky being pushed apart by someone.”

It is Tāne Māhuta, god of the forest, who legend says pushed apart the Sky Father, Ranginui, and the Earth Mother, Papa-tū-ā-nuku. Shu, the Egyptian god of air, merely holds the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb. The simpler hypothesis is that those two myths arose independently.

To his credit, Mr Livingstone does not appear to have an underlying agenda, as many alternative theories of racial origins do, but sadly, he has clearly made this claim his mission, and is unlikely to be deterred by contrary scholarship. He calls for experts to study his case, even naming an Auckland academic, but his case is so incoherent that it would be a waste of their expertise to try, and that which is claimed without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.