Get BOOK. The Rohonc Code. First discovered in a Hungarian library in , the Rohonc Codex keeps privileged company with some of the most famous unsolved writing systems in the world, notably the Voynich manuscript, the Phaistos Disk, and Linear A. Written entirely in cipher, this year-old, page-long, richly illustrated manuscript initially gained considerable attention.
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Item Preview. Such was their skill that some of their alleged products are still sometimes thought to be authentic. He brought to light a great number of fantastic items, but was not averse to supplying his clients with exquisite forgeries.
Some of these he made himself, others he probably only passed on to unsuspecting enthusiasts. It is important to note, however, that all these forgeries were short, a couple of pages at best. The Rohonc codex stands out from other hitherto undeciphered codices by its plainness: it contains no rich, colorful illustrations, indeed its pictures are almost primitive, as if radiating certain piety, and the codes are not especially decorative unlike those in the Voynich manuscript, for instance.
If it is a forgery, it must have been difficult to sell as something precious, and the immense efforts of the forger he wrote pages, after all may not have been financially rewarding. All these aspects lend weight to the idea that the codex of Rohonc is not a forgery. Other, less biased attempts at deciphering the code did not reach a solution but developed a promising methodology and offered more help for future attempts. He further analyses the paper, the ink, the type of pen used to write the codes, and the hand s which wrote the lines.
There is no obvious indicator of the text being a forgery. A close examination puts the possible number of characters at between and , but the final figure is still to be determined. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is no punctuation, one does not know where one word or sentence ends and where the next begins. Neither can the presence of a natural or artificial language behind the codes be determined, and if it is a natural language, which one it could be.
Finding little to go on in the codes, the author turns to the 84 peculiar images in the codex. Some of these are relatively easy to recognize: they tell stories from the life of Christ, among them the Annunciation, the Three Magi with the Star of Bethlehem, Christ before Pilate, and so on. Others, however, are less obvious. An art-history analysis of the images—based on the types of churches and buildings, the distorted gothic shapes—suggests that they were drawn in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries; they also have a marked East European tinge.
It may thus be possible to narrow down the potential languages associated with the codes assuming that we are dealing with a natural language to Latin, German, Hungarian, South Slavic and Romanian. The frequent repetition of certain figures, Christ included, under the same set of codes suggests some promise for this line of attack, but the breakthrough is yet to come. Similar conclusions regarding these inscriptions have recently been reached by other workers. It seems then that the codes of Rohonc conceal notions rather than letters, character strings refer to words, but single characters do not correspond to single sounds.
This throws up some very exciting possibilities, such as an apocryphal text written for and by a sect like the Bogumils, but something like a Book of Hours, a much more widespread form at the time, is more likely. But what is that text?
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