Rohonc Codex
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The Rohonc Codex () is an illustrated
manuscript A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printing, printed or repr ...
book by an unknown author, with a text in an unknown
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
and
writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form ...
, that surfaced in
Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...
in the early 19th century. The book's origin and the meaning of its text and illustrations have been investigated by many scholars and amateurs, with no definitive conclusion, although many Hungarian scholars believe that it is an 18th-century
hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
. The name of the
codex The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...
is often spelled 'Rohonczi', according to the old
Hungarian orthography Hungarian orthography ( hu, helyesírás, lit=correct writing, link=no) consists of rules defining the standard written form of the Hungarian language. It includes the spelling of lexical words, proper nouns and foreign words (loanwords) in themse ...
that was reformed in the first half of the 19th century. This spelling has become widespread, likely due to a book published on the codex by V. Enăchiuc in 2002. Today, the name of the codex is written in Hungarian as .


History

The codex was named after the city of Rohonc, in Western
Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...
(now
Rechnitz Rechnitz ( hr, Rohunac, hu, Rohonc, Rohoncz, Romani: ''Rochonca'') is a municipality in Burgenland in the Oberwart district in Austria. Geography The municipality is located in southern Burgenland, on the border with Hungary, near Bozsok and ...
,
Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
), where it was kept until 1838, when it was donated to the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( hu, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest, between Széchenyi rakpart and Akadémia utca. Its ma ...
by
Gusztáv Batthyány Gusztáv, 5th Prince Batthyány-Strattmann (8 December 1803 – 25 April 1883) was a Hungarian nobleman who bred horses in England where he was commonly known as ''Count Gustavus Batthyány''. Biography Batthyány was the son of Count Antal ...
, a Hungarian
count Count (feminine: countess) is a historical title of nobility in certain European countries, varying in relative status, generally of middling rank in the hierarchy of nobility. Pine, L. G. ''Titles: How the King Became His Majesty''. New York: ...
, together with his entire library. The origin of the codex is unknown. A possible trace of its past may be an entry in the 1743 catalogue of the Batthyánys' Rohonc library, which reads ("Hungarian prayers in one volume, size
duodecimo Paper size standards govern the size of sheets of paper used as writing paper, stationery, cards, and for some printed documents. The ISO 216 standard, which includes the commonly used A4 size, is the international standard for paper size. I ...
"). Both the size and the assumed content of the volume described fit the codex, but no further information is given in the catalogue, rendering an exact match to the codex impossible. Since the existence of the codex became widely known, the codex has been studied by many scholars and amateurs, but none has succeeded in providing a widely-accepted and convincing translation or interpretation of the text. The codex was studied by Hungarian scholar
Ferenc Toldy Ferenc Toldy (born Franz Karl Joseph Schedel, August 10, 1805, in Buda - December 10, 1875, in Budapest) was a Hungarian literary critic. Biography As a small boy, he lived with his parents, Franz Schedel and Josepha Thalherr, in Buda. He was se ...
around 1840, and later by Pál Hunfalvy and by Austrian
paleography Palaeography ( UK) or paleography ( US; ultimately from grc-gre, , ''palaiós'', "old", and , ''gráphein'', "to write") is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysi ...
expert Albert Mahl.
Josef Jireček Josef Jireček (9 October 1825, in Vysoké Mýto – 25 November 1888, in Prague) was a Czech scholar. He was born in Vysoké Mýto (then part of the Austrian Empire). He entered the Prague bureau of education in 1850, and became minister of th ...
and his son,
Konstantin Josef Jireček The first name Konstantin () is a derivation from the Latin name ''Constantinus'' ( Constantine) in some European languages, such as Russian and German. As a Christian given name, it refers to the memory of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great ...
, both university professors in
Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...
, studied 32 pages of the codex in 1884–1885. In 1885, the codex was sent to Bernhard Jülg, a professor at
Innsbruck University The University of Innsbruck (german: Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck; la, Universitas Leopoldino Franciscea) is a public research university in Innsbruck, the capital of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol, founded on October 15, 1669. I ...
.
Mihály Munkácsy Mihály Munkácsy (20 February 1844 – 1 May 1900) was a Hungarians, Hungarian Painting, painter. He earned international reputation with his Genre works, genre pictures and large-scale Christian art, biblical paintings. Early years Munk ...
, the celebrated Hungarian painter, also took the codex with him to
Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
in the years 1890–1892 to study it. In 1866, Hungarian historian
Károly Szabó :''See also Károly Szabó (Ambassador to the United States)'' Károly Szabó (November 17, 1916 – October 28, 1964) was an employee of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest from 1944 to 1945 when he rescued Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. H ...
(1824–1890) proposed that the codex was a hoax by Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), a
Transylvania Transylvania ( ro, Ardeal or ; hu, Erdély; german: Siebenbürgen) is a historical and cultural region in Central Europe, encompassing central Romania. To the east and south its natural border is the Carpathian Mountains, and to the west the Ap ...
n-Hungarian antiquarian, and co-founder of the
National Széchényi Library The National Széchényi Library ( hu, Országos Széchényi Könyvtár) (OSZK) is a library in Budapest, Hungary, located in Buda Castle. It is one of two Hungarian national libraries, the other being University of Debrecen Library. History The ...
in Budapest. Nemes is known to have created many historical forgeries (mostly made in the 1830s) which deceived even some of the most renowned Hungarian scholars of the time. Since then, this opinion of forgery has been maintained by mainstream Hungarian scholarship, even though there is no evidence connecting the codex to Nemes specifically.


Location

The Rohonc Codex is located in the Library of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences The Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( hu, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, MTA) is the most important and prestigious learned society of Hungary. Its seat is at the bank of the Danube in Budapest, between Széchenyi rakpart and Akadémia utca. Its ma ...
. Special permission is needed to study the codex. However, a microfilm copy is available. In 2015, the codex was rescanned by
Hamburg University The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...
, but only eight higher resolution pages were published. März 2015 "Das Manuskript, das niemand lesen kann"; Text von Klaus Schmeh; © für Abb. 1-4 Ungarische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Budapest


Features

The codex has 448 paper pages measuring , with each page having between 9 and 14 rows of symbols, which may or may not be letters. Besides the text, there are 87 illustrations that include religious, laic, and military scenes. The crude illustrations seem to indicate an environment where
Christian Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...
,
pagan Paganism (from classical Latin ''pāgānus'' "rural", "rustic", later "civilian") is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, or ethnic religions other than Judaism. ...
, and
Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...
religions coexist, as the symbols of the
cross A cross is a geometrical figure consisting of two intersecting lines or bars, usually perpendicular to each other. The lines usually run vertically and horizontally. A cross of oblique lines, in the shape of the Latin letter X, is termed a sa ...
,
crescent A crescent shape (, ) is a symbol or emblem used to represent the lunar phase in the first quarter (the "sickle moon"), or by extension a symbol representing the Moon itself. In Hinduism, Lord Shiva is often shown wearing a crescent moon on his ...
, and sun/
swastika The swastika (卐 or 卍) is an ancient religious and cultural symbol, predominantly in various Eurasian, as well as some African and American cultures, now also widely recognized for its appropriation by the Nazi Party and by neo-Nazis. It ...
are all present. The number of symbols used in the codex is about ten times higher than any known alphabet, with Némäti (1889) having counted 792, but most symbols are used with little repetition, so the symbols in the codex might not be an alphabet, but instead a
syllabary In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
, or be
logograph In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, ...
ic in nature, such as
Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
. The justification of the right margin would seem to imply the symbols were written from right to left. Study of the paper on which the codex is written shows that it is most probably a Venetian paper made in the 1530s. This does not provide certainty as to the date of the text, however, since it may have been transcribed from an earlier source, or the paper could have been used long after it was produced. Taking a clue from the illustrations, Láng speculates it was most likely created sometime in the 16th-17th centuries.


Language and script

No hypothesis as to the language of the codex has been backed as a universal solution, though a number - such as Hungarian, Dacian, early
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditional ...
or
Cuman The Cumans (or Kumans), also known as Polovtsians or Polovtsy (plural only, from the Russian language, Russian Exonym and endonym, exonym ), were a Turkic people, Turkic nomadic people comprising the western branch of the Cuman–Kipchak confede ...
, and even
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
- have been proposed. Many supporters of the codex's authenticity to the Hungarian language either assume that it is a paleo-Hungarian script, or draw upon resemblances to the
Old Hungarian script The Old Hungarian script or Hungarian runes ( hu, Székely-magyar rovás, 'székely-magyar runiform', or ) is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Modern Hungarian is written using the Latin-based Hungarian alph ...
, also referred to as 'Hungarian runes' (). According to others, similar characters or symbols are engraved in the caves of the
Scythian monks The Scythian monks were a community of monks from the region around the mouths of the Danube, who played an influential role in Christian theological disputes between the 4th and 6th centuries. The name ''Scythian'' comes from Scythia Minor, the c ...
in the
Dobruja Dobruja or Dobrudja (; bg, Добруджа, Dobrudzha or ''Dobrudža''; ro, Dobrogea, or ; tr, Dobruca) is a historical region in the Balkans that has been divided since the 19th century between the territories of Bulgaria and Romania. I ...
region of
Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
. Still others have drawn connections to the resemblance of some letters of the Greek charter of the Veszprémvölgy Nunnery (Hungary). Another claims it to be a version of the
Brahmi Brahmi (; ; ISO 15919, ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such ...
script.


Sumero-Hungarian hypothesis

Attila Nyíri of
Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...
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 The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
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. The text, if taken as meaningful, is of religious, perhaps liturgical character. Its beginning, according to Nyíri, reads: Nyíri'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. Also, the mere fact that Nyíri makes an uncritical allusion to the fringe theory that the Hungarian language descended from Sumerian discredits his enterprise.


Daco-Romanian hypothesis

A proposed translation was published in 2002 by
Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
n philologist Viorica Enăchiuc. Enăchiuc claimed that the text had been written in the Vulgar Latin dialect of Dacia, and the direction of writing is right-to-left, bottom-to-top. The alleged translation indicates that the text is an 11-12th century CE history of the Blaki (
Vlachs "Vlach" ( or ), also "Wallachian" (and many other variants), is a historical term and exonym used from the Middle Ages until the Modern Era to designate mainly Romanians but also Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Istro-Romanians and other Easter ...
) people in their fights against
Hungarians Hungarians, also known as Magyars ( ; hu, magyarok ), are a nation and  ethnic group native to Hungary () and historical Hungarian lands who share a common culture, history, ancestry, and language. The Hungarian language belongs to the Urali ...
and
Pechenegs The Pechenegs () or Patzinaks tr, Peçenek(ler), Middle Turkic: , ro, Pecenegi, russian: Печенег(и), uk, Печеніг(и), hu, Besenyő(k), gr, Πατζινάκοι, Πετσενέγοι, Πατζινακίται, ka, პა ...
.
Toponym Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of '' toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of ...
s and
hydronym A hydronym (from el, ὕδρω, , "water" and , , "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a ...
s appear as Arad, Dridu,
Olbia Olbia (, ; sc, Terranoa; sdn, Tarranoa) is a city and commune of 60,346 inhabitants (May 2018) in the Italian insular province of Sassari in northeastern Sardinia, Italy, in the historical region of Gallura. Called ''Olbia'' in the Roman age, ...
,
Ineu Ineu (; Hungarian: ''Borosjenő''; Serbian: Јенопоље/''Jenopolje''; Turkish: ''Yanova'') is a town in Arad County, western Transylvania, Romania. It is situated at a distance of from the county capital, Arad, it occupies a surface ...
, Rarău,
Dniester The Dniester, ; rus, Дне́стр, links=1, Dnéstr, ˈdⁿʲestr; ro, Nistru; grc, Τύρᾱς, Tyrās, ; la, Tyrās, la, Danaster, label=none, ) ( ,) is a transboundary river in Eastern Europe. It runs first through Ukraine and th ...
and
Tisa The Tisza, Tysa or Tisa, is one of the major rivers of Central and Eastern Europe. Once, it was called "the most Hungarian river" because it flowed entirely within the Kingdom of Hungary. Today, it crosses several national borders. The Tisza be ...
. Diplomatic contacts between
Vlad Vlad is a Romanian male given name. It is more commonly a nativized hypocorism of Vladislav and can also be used as a surname. It may refer to: Given name People * Vlad I of Wallachia (), ''voivode'' (prince) of Wallachia * Vlad II Dracul ( ...
and Alexis Comnenus, Constantine Dukas and Robert of Flanders are also mentioned. Quotations from Enăchiuc's translation include: On the one hand, Enăchiuc's proposition can be criticized for the method of transliteration. Symbols that characteristically appear in the same context throughout the codex are regularly transliterated with different letters, so that the patterns in the original code are lost in the transliteration. On the other hand, Enăchiuc is criticized as a linguist and historian. She provided the only linguistic source of a hitherto unknown state of the
Romanian language Romanian (obsolete spellings: Rumanian or Roumanian; autonym: ''limba română'' , or ''românește'', ) is the official and main language of Romania and the Moldova, Republic of Moldova. As a minority language it is spoken by stable communi ...
, and her text (even with her glossary) raises such serious doubts both in its linguistic and historic authenticity that they render her work unscientific. There is no relation between the illustrations of the manuscript (of clear Christian content) and Enăchiuc's translation.


Brahmi-Hindi hypothesis

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 Brahmi (; ; ISO 15919, ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such ...
script. He transliterated the first 24 pages of the codex to get a
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
text which was translated to Hungarian. His solution is mostly like the beginning of an
apocrypha Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. The word ''apocryphal'' (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered ...
l gospel (previously unknown), with a meditative prologue, then going on to the infancy narrative of Jesus. According to Mahesh Kumar Singh, the upper two rows of page 1 read: Singh's attempt was immediately criticized in the next issue of the same journal. His transliteration lacks consistency, and was dismissed by many.


Systematic attempts

A strictly methodical (and successful) 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. His later remarks suggest that he also has many unpublished conjectures, based on a large amount of statistical data. Miklós Locsmándi did some computer-based research on the text in the mid-1990s. He confirmed the published findings of Gyürk, adding several others. Although with no strong arguments, he claimed the symbol "i" to be a sentence delimiter (but also the symbol of 11 (eleven), and possibly also a place value delimiter in numbers). He studied the diacritics of the symbols (mostly dots), but found no peculiar system in their usage. As he could see no traces of case endings (which are typically characteristic to the
Hungarian language Hungarian () is an Uralic language spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary, it is also spoken by Hungarian ...
), 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. After 2000, research around the codex has become more intense. 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; # An
artificial language Artificial languages are languages of a typically very limited size which emerge either in computer simulations between artificial agents, robot interactions or controlled psychological experiments with humans. They are different from both constr ...
. Láng assessed these possibilities systematically in his publications with the help of historical analogies. In 2010, Gábor Tokai published a series of three short articles in the Hungarian popular science weekly, . Tokai tried to date the codex by finding historical analogies of the imagery of the drawings. Although he brought up numerous valuable observations, his conclusions were somewhat vague. Nevertheless, his research was the first of its kind. Tokai could not rule out the possibility of a hoax, but he (like Locsmándi) insisted that whatever be the case, the text has regularities that strongly suggest a meaning. Several months later Tokai also published two similarly short articles in which he started to give meaning to specific code chunks. He based his arguments mainly on character strings that appear in pictures (such as the
INRI In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the King of the Jews, both at the beginning of his life and at the end. In the Koine Greek of the New Testament, e.g., in John 19:3, this is written as '' Basileus ton Ioudaion'' (). Both uses of t ...
inscription on the cross). He claimed to have identified the codes of the four evangelists in biblical references, built up of an evangelist's name and a number, possibly some kind of chapter number. Based on Gyürk's and Locsmándi's work he also showed that many of the four digit numbers in the text are year numbers, using presumably a peculiar
Anno Mundi (from Latin "in the year of the world"; he, לבריאת העולם, Livryat haOlam, lit=to the creation of the world), abbreviated as AM or A.M., or Year After Creation, is a calendar era based on the Bible, biblical accounts of the Genesi ...
epoch In chronology and periodization, an epoch or reference epoch is an instant in time chosen as the origin of a particular calendar era. The "epoch" serves as a reference point from which time is measured. The moment of epoch is usually decided by ...
. Simultaneous with, and independently from Tokai, Levente Zoltán Király made significant progress in describing some structural elements of the code. In 2011 he demonstrated a method for cutting down the text into sentences with a good probability. He identified a 7 page section split by numbered headings, with the whole section preceded by its table of contents. Like Tokai, Király also discovered the codes of the four evangelists, and in addition he provided a persuasive argument for a "chapter heading system" in the codex that contains biblical references. He also dealt with the overall structure of the codex, showing that the chapter structure is not present in the first fourth of the book, partly because that part contains the long, continuous narration of the
passion of Jesus Christ In Christianity, the Passion (from the Latin verb ''patior, passus sum''; "to suffer, bear, endure", from which also "patience, patient", etc.) is the short final period in the life of Jesus Christ. Depending on one's views, the "Passion" m ...
. According to Tokai and Király, the script is a code system that does not indicate the inner structure of words, and the language of the text is most probably artificial, as optionally proposed by Benedek Láng. They claim that the codex contains the date 1593 CE as a probable reference to its writing. They also state that by character it is an ordinary
Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
reader or
breviary A breviary (Latin: ''breviarium'') is a liturgical book used in Christianity for praying the canonical hours, usually recited at seven fixed prayer times. Historically, different breviaries were used in the various parts of Christendom, such a ...
of the time, mostly containing
paraphrase A paraphrase () is a restatement of the meaning of a text or passage using other words. The term itself is derived via Latin ', . The act of paraphrasing is also called ''paraphrasis''. History Although paraphrases likely abounded in oral tra ...
s of New Testament texts (primarily from the Gospels), but also some non-Biblical material, like e.g.
Seth Seth,; el, Σήθ ''Sḗth''; ; "placed", "appointed") in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mandaeism, and Sethianism, was the third son of Adam and Eve and brother of Cain and Abel, their only other child mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible. A ...
returning to the gate of
Paradise In religion, paradise is a place of exceptional happiness and delight. Paradisiacal notions are often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both, often compared to the miseries of human civilization: in paradis ...
, or prayers to the
Virgin Mary Mary; arc, ܡܪܝܡ, translit=Mariam; ar, مريم, translit=Maryam; grc, Μαρία, translit=María; la, Maria; cop, Ⲙⲁⲣⲓⲁ, translit=Maria was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother o ...
. In 2018, Tokai and Király reported further progress in their work.


See also

*
Voynich manuscript The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an otherwise unknown writing system, referred to as 'Voynichese'. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and stylistic anal ...
*
Codex Seraphinianus The ''Codex Seraphinianus'', originally published in 1981, is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini between 1976 and 1978. It is approximately 360 pages (dep ...


Notes


References


Citations


Bibliography

''In chronological order'' * * * * * * * (2nd, enlarged edition: 1907, pp. 20–22.), reprint: Budapest, Laude Kiadó, 1998 (); Budapest, Anno, 2004 () * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (with freely downloadabl
pre-print version
* * * * * * * *


Media references

* * *


External links


The Rohonc Codex digitised at the Library and Information Centre, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Bobory, Dóra, A rohonci kód (The Rohonc Code). By Benedek Láng. Hungarian Historical Review, 2:(4), 938-943. (2013) on academia.edu

Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
{{Authority control 1838 archaeological discoveries Constructed-language media Illuminated manuscripts Manuscripts written in undeciphered writing systems