This work is devoted to the analysis of high frequency solutions to the equations of nonlinear elasticity in a half-space. The authors consider surface waves (or more precisely, Rayleigh waves) arising in the general class of isotropic hyperelastic models, which includes in particular the Saint Venant-Kirchhoff system. Work has been done by a number of authors since the 1980s on the formulation and well-posedness of a nonlinear evolution equation whose (exact) solution gives the leading term of an approximate Rayleigh wave solution to the underlying elasticity equations. This evolution...