Rohonc Codex
A possible trace of its past may be an entry in the 1743 catalogue of the Batthyánys' Rohonc library, which reads "Magyar imádságok, volumen I in 12" ("Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo").
The crude illustrations seem to indicate an environment where Christian, pagan, and Muslim religions coexist, as the symbols of the cross, crescent, and sun/swastika are all present.
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 or Cuman, and even Hindi[5] – have been proposed.
[citation needed] The codex was studied by Hungarian scholar Ferenc Toldy around 1840, and later by Pál Hunfalvy and by Austrian paleography expert Albert Mahl.
[8] In 1866, Hungarian historian Károly Szabó (1824–1890) proposed that the codex was a hoax by Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), a Transylvanian-Hungarian antiquarian, and co-founder of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest.
[9] 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.
[17] He turned the pages upside down, identified a Sumerian ligature, and then associated Latin alphabet letters to the rest of the symbols by resemblance.
"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.
[18] Also, the mere fact that Nyíri makes an uncritical allusion to the fringe theory that the Hungarian language descended from Sumerian discredits his enterprise.
[19] Enăchiuc claimed that the text had been written in the Dacian dialect of vulgar Latin, 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) people in their fights against Hungarians and Pechenegs.
Quotations from Enăchiuc's translation include: Solrgco zicjra naprzi olto co sesvil cas "O Sun of the live let write what span the time"[20] Deteti lis vivit neglivlu iti iti itia niteren titius suonares imi urast ucen
His solution is mostly like the beginning of an apocryphal gospel (previously unknown), with a meditative prologue, then going on to the infancy narrative of Jesus.
[citation needed] According to Mahesh Kumar Singh, the upper two rows of page 1 read: he bhagwan log bahoot garib yahan bimar aur bhookhe hai / inko itni sakti aur himmat do taki ye apne karmo ko pura kar sake[25] "Oh, my God!
[28] Benedek Láng summarized the previous attempts and the possible research directions in a 2010 article[29] and in a 2011 book-sized monograph.
[4] He argued that the codex is not a hoax (as opposed to mainstream Hungarian academic opinion),[citation needed] but instead is a consciously encoded or enciphered text.
In 2010, Gábor Tokai published a series of three short articles in the Hungarian popular science weekly, Élet és Tudomány.
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.
[30][31] Simultaneous with, and independently from Tokai, Levente Zoltán Király made significant progress in describing some structural elements of the code.
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.
They also state that by character it is an ordinary Catholic reader or breviary of the time, mostly containing paraphrases of New Testament texts (primarily from the Gospels), but also some non-Biblical material, like e.g. Seth returning to the gate of Paradise, or prayers to the Virgin Mary.
