The Rohonc Codex (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈrohont͡s]) 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. Enăchiuc in 2002. Today, the name of the codex is often written in Hungarian as Rohonci kódex.
History 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. The origin of the codex is unknown. 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.
Location and accessibility
The Rohonc Codex is located in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Special permission is needed to study the codex. However, a microfilm copy is available. In 2015, the codex was rescanned by Hamburg University, but only eight higher-resolution pages were published. A digital copy is available at the REAL repository of the Library.
Features
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. Besides the text, there are 87 illustrations that include religious, laic, and military scenes. The crude illustrations seem to indicate an environment where Christian, Pagan, and Muslim religions coexist, as the symbols of the cross, crescent, and sun/swastika are all present. 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. The justification of the right margin would seem to imply the symbols were written from right to left. Study of the paper on which the codex is written shows that it is most probably a Venetian paper made in the 1530s. This does not provide certainty as to the date of the text, however, since it may have been transcribed from an earlier source, or the paper could have been used long after it was produced. Taking a clue from the illustrations, Láng speculates the document was most likely created sometime in the 16th-17th centuries.
Analysis 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. However, there is no widely accepted and convincing translation or interpretation of the text.
Language hypotheses 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. In 1892, Némäti discussed the codex's authenticity to the Hungarian language and the possibility that it is a paleo-Hungarian script. In 2004, Singh and Bárdi discussed the possibility of it being a version of the Brahmi script.
19th Century 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 1885, the codex was sent to Bernhard Jülg, a professor at Innsbruck University. Mihály Munkácsy, the celebrated Hungarian painter, also took the codex with him to Paris in the years 1890–1892 to study it. 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. Nemes is known to have created many historical forgeries (mostly made in the 1830s) which deceived even some of the most renowned Hungarian scholars of the time. 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.
Systematic and computer analysis A strictly methodical investigation of the symbols was first done in 1970 by Ottó Gyürk, who examined repeated sequences to find the direction of writing, arguing for a right-to-left, top-to-bottom order, with pages also ordered right-to-left; Gyürk also identified numbers in the text. His later remarks suggest that he also has many unpublished conjectures, based on a large amount of statistical data. Miklós Locsmándi did some computer-based research on the text in the mid-1990s. His research findings were consistent with the work published by Gyürk. Locsmándi added several others conjectures. He claimed the symbol "i" to be a sentence delimiter (but also the symbol of 11 (eleven), and possibly also a place value delimiter in numbers). He studied the diacritics of the symbols (mostly dots), but found no peculiar system in their usage. As he could see no traces of case endings (which are typically characteristic to the Hungarian language), he assumed that the text was probably in a language other than Hungarian. He could not prove that the codex is not a hoax; however, seeing the regularities of the text, he rejected the idea of it being pure gibberish.
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