A History of the Rohonc Codex From a donated library in 1838 to a peer-reviewed reading in 2018. Who looked at it, what they concluded, and how often the answer was that it could not be done.
The useful thing about the history of this manuscript is how consistent it is. For most of two hundred years the codex was handed to a distinguished person, examined, and handed back without a conclusion. The pattern only changes in the 1970s, and it changes because the question changes: instead of asking what the text says, researchers began asking what its structure is. Everything that has held was found that way.
I. The Record
- 1743A Batthyány catalogue
Lists Hungarian prayers in one volume, duodecimo. Possibly this book. Possibly not. It is the only candidate for a record of the codex before it surfaces.
- 1838Count Gusztáv Batthyány
Donates the family library at Rohonc to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The codex is in it. This is where its documented existence begins.
- c. 1840Ferenc Toldy
The founding figure of Hungarian literary history examines it. He publishes little. It is the first of many inspections by a serious scholar that end without a conclusion.
- 1844János Jerney
Publishes the first substantial notice, in Tudománytár, describing the writing as belonging to no known system.
- 1866Károly Szabó
Proposes that the codex is a fabrication by Sámuel Literáti Nemes, a Transylvanian antiquarian and a known forger who was active in the 1830s and died in 1842. No evidence has ever connected Nemes to this manuscript specifically. The attribution nevertheless became, and largely remains, the mainstream Hungarian position.
- 1884–85Josef and Konstantin Josef Jireček
Father and son, both professors in Prague, study 32 pages. No result.
- 1885Bernhard Jülg
The Innsbruck orientalist receives the codex for study. No result.
- 1890–92Mihály Munkácsy
The painter, then at the height of his fame in Paris, takes the manuscript there so it can be examined. No result. By this point the codex has defeated a literary historian, an orientalist, two Prague professors and a paleographer.
- 1889–92Kálmán Némäti
The first systematic study. He catalogues roughly 792 distinct symbols, notes that this is about ten times the size of any known alphabet, and draws the correct inference: whatever this is, it is unlikely to be alphabetic, and more likely a syllabary or a system in which symbols stand for words. Published as Rohonczi Codex Tantétel in 1892.
- 1970Ottó Gyürk
The turning point, and it is a change of question. Instead of trying to read the text he measures it, working on repeated sequences of symbols. He establishes the reading order: right to left, top to bottom, with the pages themselves running right to left. He identifies patterns that behave like numbers. Much of his statistical work was never published.
- mid–1990sMiklós Locsmándi
Repeats the exercise with a computer and confirms Gyürk. He finds that one symbol behaves as a sentence delimiter, that the diacritic dots follow no system he can detect, and, importantly, that there are no case endings, which argues against the text being Hungarian. He concludes the regularity is too strong for the text to be gibberish, while being unable to rule out a hoax.
- 1996Attila Nyíri
Proposes a Sumero-Hungarian reading. Refuted.
- 2002Viorica Enăchiuc
Publishes a full translation as a Vlach war chronicle in a Dacian dialect of Latin. Refuted.
- 2004Mahesh Kumar Singh
Publishes a reading of the first 24 pages as Hindi in a variant of Brahmi. Refuted in the same journal issue.
- 2010–11Benedek Láng
Publishes a systematic survey and then a monograph, the first treatment to work through the possibilities methodically using historical analogies. His conclusion is that the codex is not a hoax but a deliberately encoded text, whether a cipher, a shorthand or a constructed language. This is the point at which the forgery consensus starts to look weaker.
- 2010–11Gábor Tokai
An art historian, working from the pictures. In three short articles he dates the imagery, and finds structure in the text around it: coded INRI inscriptions on the drawn crosses, codes that behave like the names of the evangelists followed by numbers, and four-digit numbers that behave like years counted from the creation of the world.
- 2011Levente Zoltán Király
Independently and in parallel, working from the text. He finds a way to segment sentences, a seven-page section with numbered headings that functions as a table of contents, the same evangelist codes Tokai had found, and a chapter system carrying biblical references. He also explains why the first quarter of the book has no chapter structure: it is one long Passion narrative.
- 2015University of Hamburg
Rephotographs eight pages at higher resolution. Eight, out of 448.
- 2018Tokai and Király
Publish jointly in Cryptologia. Their conclusion is that the writing is a code rather than a cipher, that the content is an ordinary Catholic prayer book of its period, and that a date in the text points to 1593. The reading, and the objections to it.
II. The Shape of It
Read the timeline as a whole and one thing stands out. For a hundred and thirty years the codex was given to eminent people who looked at it and gave it back. Toldy, Jerney, Hunfalvy, the Jirečeks, Jülg, a paleographer from Vienna, and Munkácsy carrying it across Europe. None of them produced anything that survives.
What broke the pattern was not a cleverer reader. It was Gyürk in 1970 asking a different and much smaller question: not what does this say, but which way does it run, and what repeats. That question can be answered without knowing the language, and its answers accumulate. Everything now believed about the codex descends from that change, through Locsmándi's computer work, Tokai's numbers and Király's chapter structure.
The three readings that failed all did the opposite. Each began by deciding what language the text was in, and worked backwards. That is the difference, and it is worth more than any of the individual results.