The Rohonc Codex: A Prayer Book No One Can Read

In 1838 the Hungarian nobleman Count Gusztáv Batthyány gave his family library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Among the thirty thousand volumes was a small book, about 12 by 10 centimetres, of 448 paper pages. It was written right to left in a script of about two hundred distinct signs, and it had 87 drawings: crucifixions, a Last Supper, soldiers, and symbols that look Christian, pagan and Islamic by turns. It had come from the library at Rohonc (today Rechnitz, in Austria). Nearly two centuries later, it is still unread.

The object

• 448 pages of paper. Watermarks have been matched to Venetian paper of the sixteenth century (roughly the 1520s–1540s). That dates the paper, not the writing.
• Around 200 signs. That is too many for an alphabet and too few for a logographic script such as Chinese. The number points to a syllabary, a mixed system, or a cipher with abbreviation symbols.
• Direction. The text appears to run right to left, judging from where lines break and where the pictures sit.
• Illustrations include Christian scenes alongside a crescent and a cross drawn together.

Hoax or text?

• The hoax hypothesis. The historian Károly Szabó proposed in the nineteenth century that it was forged by Sámuel Literáti Nemes, a Transylvanian antiquarian known to have produced documented forgeries in the 1830s. The sixteenth-century paper does not rule this out, because old blank paper could be used, but the sheer length of the book and its internal consistency make a hoax harder to sustain.
• Claimed readings. Over the years people have proposed that it is Old Hungarian (Székely runes), Dacian, Brahmi-derived, Sumerian and more. None has survived scrutiny.
• The most serious recent work. In 2018, in the journal Cryptologia, Levente Zoltán Király and Gábor Tokai argued that the codex is a coded Christian devotional text, something like a breviary. They proposed that it paraphrases New Testament passages and uses an invented cipher-script with many abbreviation signs, and they suggested a late-sixteenth-century date. Their analysis identified numerals and the structure of some passages but did not produce a full reading.

Symbology

Signs beside pictures. The drawings of Gospel scenes give readers anchors. Where a crucifixion appears, the nearby text is probably about the Passion. That is how the 2018 study proposed its Christian reading. It is a real method, similar to reading a bilingual inscription, but it produces hypotheses rather than translations.

Cross and crescent together. Drawings that combine Christian and Islamic symbols have fed theories of a Dacian, Cuman or "syncretic" origin. For a book from Ottoman-bordering Hungary, the combination may simply reflect the world its author lived in. The meaning of those images is open.

Connections

The Voynich Manuscript (V01) and the Book of Soyga (V19), which are other unread or disputed scripts, and the Reformation-era Christianity of Central Europe (ch31).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/rohonc-codex.html