The Rohonc Codex, a Hungarian book in an unknown script

In 1838 Count Gusztáv Batthyány donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest his family library, kept until then in the castle of Rohonc, today's Rechnitz in Austria. Among those volumes was a small-format book written in characters no one recognised. It has since been known as the Rohonc Codex and is still kept in the Hungarian capital.

The book and its images

The codex has 448 paper pages and 87 illustrations. Examination of the paper pointed to Venetian production of the sixteenth century, but this tells us when the material was made, not necessarily when the text was written. Nothing is known of its history before it entered the Batthyány library: there are no inventories or letters describing it at an earlier date.

The illustrations are simple drawings. Many depict recognisable scenes from the Christian tradition, such as the Crucifixion, but alongside the crosses there are also crescents and suns, a combination that has fuelled all kinds of hypotheses about the cultural setting the book came from. Other images show figures in clothing that is hard to place, buildings and battle scenes, always drawn with a spare line.

An alphabet of hundreds of signs

According to many scholars the script runs from right to left, and it uses a very large number of signs, estimated at several hundred depending on the criteria adopted. Such a vast repertoire is not typical of an alphabet and has suggested a mixed system, a cipher or an invented script. Some signs resemble letters of known alphabets, but the resemblance has not led to a reading.

During the twentieth century and the early 2000s decipherments were proposed based on Old Hungarian, Romanian and other languages. Each found some supporters, but none has been accepted by the scholarly community, because none produces a coherent text when the same rules are applied throughout the manuscript. Often, moreover, the texts obtained do not match the evident content of the illustrations beside them.

The forgery hypothesis

Some scholars believe the codex may be a forgery. The suspicion most often mentioned concerns Sámuel Literáti Nemes, a nineteenth-century Hungarian antiquarian known for fabricating documents presented as ancient. The hypothesis, however, is only circumstantial: the paper is older than his time and there is no direct evidence of his involvement.

Others think of a genuine work, perhaps composed in a devout setting for private use, with a personal writing system. In the absence of parallel texts or a key, both positions remain open, and the debate rests mainly on the internal analysis of the signs and images. The religious subject matter of the images suggests a devotional text, but the precise link between pictures and script has never been convincingly demonstrated.

The Rohonc Codex is less famous than the Voynich Manuscript, but it raises similar questions: who created such a complex script, and for what purpose? For now the only certainties concern the paper, the images and the noble library from which the book came. Everything else, from the author to the language, still belongs to the realm of hypothesis.