The Rohonc Codex 448 pages in a script nobody has read, on Venetian paper of the 1530s. Two centuries of attention, four proposed readings that disagree even about which direction the text runs, and one result the field takes seriously. Not a decipherment.
A small book, about the size of a paperback, holding 448 pages of dense writing in a script that matches no known writing system, illustrated with 87 drawings of religious, secular and military scenes. It appeared in 1838 in a donated library and has no documented history before that date. Its paper is Venetian, watermarked to the 1530s.
Since then it has been examined by a Hungarian literary historian, an Innsbruck orientalist, two professors in Prague, a celebrated painter who carried it to Paris, and a succession of researchers with computers. It has been declared a forgery, a Dacian war chronicle, a Hindi gospel, a Sumerian prayer, and an ordinary Catholic prayer book. Most of those cannot all be true, and in fact none of the first four survived scrutiny.
These pages set out what the object is, what happened to it, what has been claimed about it and on what evidence, and why the data needed to test any of it is not available to the public. That last point is the reason this site carries no finding of its own.
- Object
- MS K 114
- Held
- Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
- Pages
- 448 · approx. 12 × 10 cm
- Paper
- Venetian watermark, 1529–1540
- Illustrations
- 87
- Signs
- Disputed · up to 792 counted
- Provenance
- Donated 1838, Count Gusztáv Batthyány
- Status
- Undeciphered · no claim made here
- It presents no reading of the codex and no result of ours. We have not assigned a sound or a meaning to a single sign.
- The one published reading the field takes seriously is Király and Tokai's, and it is theirs. It is described in their terms, with the objections to it.
- Our only original contribution is a measurement of the public page images, and it is negative: they are not sufficient to build a transcription that could be trusted.
- No decipherment is claimed here, for anybody's work including ours.
I. The Object
The book is small and dense. Each page carries between nine and fourteen rows of symbols. The paper is the one part of it that can be dated with confidence: every leaf bears a watermark of an anchor inside a circle inside a six-rayed star, a Venetian design in use between 1529 and 1540.
That dates the paper and not the text. A scribe can write on old stock, and a copyist can put a much older exemplar onto new paper. It sets a floor, not an age. On the evidence of the drawings, most estimates put the writing in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The name comes from Rohonc, in western Hungary, now Rechnitz in Austria. In 1838 Count Gusztáv Batthyány gave his family library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the codex was in it. Before that there is nothing certain. A 1743 catalogue of the Batthyány holdings lists Magyar imádságok, volumen I in 12, Hungarian prayers in one duodecimo volume, which is the right size and the right sort of description, but the identification is an inference and not a chain of custody.
It is still in that library, as manuscript K 114. Consulting the original requires permission. There is a microfilm, and there are digital scans of varying quality, including eight pages rephotographed at higher resolution by the University of Hamburg in 2015.
Four further pages set out the rest: what happened to the codex over two centuries, the four readings that have been proposed and what became of them, what is actually known about the writing itself, and why none of it can currently be tested by anyone outside two people.