New evidence on the Rohonc Codex: authorship, provenance, and script continuity

The Rohonc Codex—widely regarded as the second most enigmatic encrypted manuscript in the world—has long attracted scholarly attention based on both its physical characteristics and its mysterious content. Despite considerable efforts in historical, codicological, and cryptographic research, which have rendered much of the text decipherable, numerous aspects remain obscure, chief among them the identity of its author.This article presents new findings based on a recently discovered letter, to which four previously unknown pages written in the script of the Codex were appended. This source sheds new light on the origins, transmission, and authorship of the manuscript. On the basis of this discovery, the following new claims can be advanced with a great degree of certaintyThe Codex likely entered the Batthyány Library, where it was ultimately preserved, around the year 1571, not in later centuries.The manuscript was in all likelihood produced in Hungary, or at least within the Central European region.Its author was an erudite individual, a deák (scribe), rather than an unlearned genius or a religious sect.We find him in the southern territory of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1571 but his nationality or even origin remains, at this point, subject to speculation.The contemporary letter describes the author as a timid, socially awkward or unconventional figure.Invented before the year 1571, the Rohonc script constitutes an exceptionally early instance of an artificial language system—or, at the very least, an artificial writing—predating most similar efforts by several decades.It is now possible to definitively rule out the hypothesis that the Rohonc Codex is a 19th-century forgery or hoax, as its script has independently survived in at least two distinct contexts, one of which is a dated sixteenth century source.The four newly discovered pages can be read coherently using the same decryption method previously applied to the Codex, thus further validating the decipherment.Nonetheless, several key questions remain unresolved, leaving ample scope for continued investigation.