The Rohonc Codex was first discovered in a Hungarian library in 1838. Similar to the Voynich manuscript, the Rohonc Codex has an unknown writing system. 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.
The discovery of this mysterious book appeared when Gustav Batthyany donated his library books to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. One of the books contained a strange book. The writing in it was incomprehensible. It is not known what letters were used in the book and what the pictures in it meant. The book then became widely known and attracted the interest of historians and amateurs to translate the book which later became known as The Rohonc Codex. Gustav Batthyany or Prince Gustavus Batthyany was a Hungarian nobleman who bred horses in England.
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| Rohonc Codex. (Image Credit: Wikipedia) |
The name Rohonc Codex was taken from the name of the city of Rohonc in western Hungary (now Rechnitz). Previously this book was only called Hungarian prayer in Gustav Batthyany's library catalog. Where this manuscript came from was never known.
There are many religious symbols such as Christianity, Islam and several illustrations of astronomical symbols, such as stars, suns and crescents in the book. In addition, there are also pagan instructions and symbols. The writing system is no less fascinating than the illustrations. Some characters in the illustrations look like runes, others look round and not far from runes. Various linguists estimate that the manuscript was written in Greek, Cyrillic, or even an alphabet originating from an ancient, obscure region from the Roman era called Dacia.
This book is 400 years old and written in cipher, which consists of 448 pages measuring 12x10 cm with each having between 9 and 14 lines of symbols that may be letters. It is not clear how to read the manuscript whether from the left or from the right. Meanwhile, besides the text with strange symbols, there are 87 illustrations in it concerning religion, and the military. That is why the owner included it in the category of Hungarian prayer books.
According to research conducted on the paper of this codex, it is estimated to use paper from Venice made around the 1530s. Meanwhile, the language used in this manuscript is unknown. Many suspect that the language in the Rohonc codex is likely Roman, Hungarian, or Hindi. However, all of this has not been proven.
Rohonc Codex gained popularity among historians and amateurs. Many were interested in trying to translate the meaning in it. However, until now no one has been able to interpret the contents of this confusing manuscript.
In 1840, this manuscript was studied by Ferenc Toldy, then by Pal Hunfalvy and an Austrian paleographer, Albert Mahl. After that, this manuscript was also studied by father and son Josef Jirecek and Konstantin Josef Jirecek who were both professors at the University of Paraha. They studied this codex between 1884-1885.
A year later the codex was sent to Bernhard Julg, a professor at Innsbruck University. Then Mihaly Munkacsy, a Hungarian painter, also took the manuscript to Paris in 1890-1892 to study it.
This manuscript was once called a hoax, one of them by a Hungarian historian, Karoly Szabo. However, many believe that the Rohonc Codex is genuine.
A claim then came in the 1860s. It was said that this manuscript was written by Samuel Literati Nemes (1796-1842). However, this claim could not be proven. The paper from the Rohonc Codex itself comes from the 16th century.
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.
In the mid-1990s Miklós Locsmándi did some computer-based research on the text. His research findings were consistent with the work published by Gyürk. Locsmándi added several others conjectures. 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 different from Hungarian. He could not prove that the codex is not a hoax; however, seeing the regularities of the text, he rejected that it be pure gibberish.
Attila NyÃri of Hungary proposed a solution in 1996 after studying two pages of the codex. He turned the pages upside down, identified a Sumerian ligature, and then associated Latin alphabet letters to the rest of the symbols by resemblance. However, he sometimes transliterated the same symbol with different letters, and conversely, the same letter was decoded from several symbols. Even then he had to rearrange the order of the letters to produce meaningful words. NyÃri's proposition was immediately criticised by Ottó Gyürk, pointing to the fact that with such a permissive deciphering method one can get anything out of the code.
In 2002, a proposed translation was published by Romanian philologist Viorica Enăchiuc. Enăchiuc claimed that the text had been written in the Dacian dialect of vulgar Latin, and the direction of writing is right-to-left, bottom-to-top. However, Enăchiuc is criticized as a linguist and historian. She provided the only linguistic source of a hitherto unknown state of the Romanian language, and her text (even with her glossary) raises such serious doubts both in its linguistic and historic authenticity that they render her work unscientific. Also, there is no relation between the illustrations of the manuscript (of clear Christian content) and Enăchiuc's translation.
Another alleged solution was made in 2004 by the Indian Mahesh Kumar Singh. He claims that the codex is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom with a so far undocumented variant of the Brahmi script. He transliterated the first 24 pages of the codex to get a Hindi text which was translated to Hungarian. Singh's attempt was immediately criticized in the next issue of the same journal. His transliteration lacks consistency.
Benedek Láng summarized the previous attempts and the possible research directions in a 2010 article and in a 2011 book-sized monograph. He argued that the codex is not a hoax (as opposed to mainstream Hungarian academic opinion), but instead is a consciously encoded or enciphered text. It may be: a cipher, a shorthand system, or a constructed language.
In 2018, Gábor Tokai and Levente Zoltán Király published the paper "Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex". The paper claimed the writing was not a substitution cipher, or an ancient alphabet, but is in fact a 'code system' which does not indicate the inner structure of words.
Until now, the Rohonc Codex is still a mystery. No one knows for sure where it came from or what the contents of the manuscript are.
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