DiscoverScroll article

The Rohonc Codex (Hungarian pronunciation: ) is an illustrated manuscript book by an unknown author, with a text in an unknown language and writing system, that surfaced in Hungary in the early 19th century.

The book's origin and the meaning of its text and illustrations have been investigated by many scholars and amateurs, with no definitive conclusion, although many Hungarian scholars believe that it is an 18th-century hoax. The name of the codex is often spelled Rohonczi, according to the old Hungarian orthography that was reformed in the first half of the 19th century. This spelling has become widespread, likely due to a book published on the codex by V. Today, the name of the codex is often written in Hungarian as Rohonci kódex.

The codex was named after the city of Rohonc, in Western Hungary (now Rechnitz, Austria), where it was kept until 1838, when it was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Gusztáv Batthyány, a Hungarian count, together with his entire library. A possible trace of its past may be an entry in the 1743 catalogue of the Batthyánys' Rohonc library, which reads "Magyar imádságok, volumen I in 12" ("Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo"). Both the size and the assumed content of the volume described fit the codex, but no further information is given in the catalogue, rendering an exact match to the codex impossible.

The Rohonc Codex is located in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The codex has 448 paper pages measuring 12 by 10 centimetres (4.7 in × 3.9 in), with each page having between 9 and 14 rows of symbols, which may or may not be letters. The number of symbols used in the codex is about ten times higher than any known alphabet, with Némäti (1889) having counted 792, but most symbols are used with little repetition, so the symbols in the codex might not be an alphabet, but instead a syllabary, or be logographic in nature, such as Chinese characters. Study of the paper on which the codex is written shows that it is most probably a Venetian paper made in the 1530s.

As the existence of the codex has become more widely known, since the 19th century, the codex has been studied by many scholars and amateurs.

No hypothesis as to the language of the codex has been backed as a universal solution, though a number – such as Hungarian, Dacian, early Romanian or Cuman, and even Hindi – have been proposed. The codex was studied by Hungarian scholar Ferenc Toldy around 1840, and later by Pál Hunfalvy and by Austrian paleography expert Albert Mahl. Josef Jireček and his son, Konstantin Josef Jireček, both university professors in Prague, studied 32 pages of the codex in 1884–1885. In 1866, Hungarian historian Károly Szabó (1824–1890) proposed that the codex was a hoax by Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), a Transylvanian-Hungarian antiquarian, and co-founder of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. Since then, this opinion of forgery has been maintained by mainstream Hungarian scholarship, even though there is no evidence connecting the codex to Nemes specifically.

Attila Nyíri of Hungary proposed a solution in 1996 after studying two pages of the codex.

Symbols that characteristically appear in the same context throughout the codex are regularly transliterated with different letters, so that the patterns in the original code are lost in the transliteration.

He transliterated the first 24 pages of the codex to get a Hindi text which was translated to Hungarian. Like Tokai, Király also discovered the codes of the four evangelists, and in addition he provided a persuasive argument for a "chapter heading system" in the codex that contains biblical references. In 2018, Tokai and Király published the paper Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex.

The Rohonc Codex digitised at the Library and Information Centre, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Quick Facts

• The codex was named after the city of Rohonc, in Western Hungary (now Rechnitz, Austria), where it was kept until 1838, when it was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Gusztáv Batthyány, a Hungarian count, together with his entire library.
• Today, the name of the codex is often written in Hungarian as Rohonci kódex.
• The name of the codex is often spelled Rohonczi, according to the old Hungarian orthography that was reformed in the first half of the 19th century.
• This spelling has become widespread, likely due to a book published on the codex by V.
• In 2018, Tokai and Király published the paper Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Rohonc Codex". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.