448 Pages Nobody Can Read: The Rohonc Codex
The book is small enough to hold in one hand. It measures roughly twelve by ten centimetres, it runs to 448 paper pages, and every page is packed with nine to fourteen rows of tight, hand drawn symbols. Nobody can read a word of it. The Rohonc Codex is one of the most stubborn unsolved documents in Europe, and after almost two hundred years of study the basic questions about it are still open: what language it records, what system its script uses, and whether it means anything at all.
Its documented history begins in 1838, when Count Gusztav Batthyany donated his family library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The codex came with the collection. It takes its name from Rohonc, the town in western Hungary where the library was kept, now Rechnitz in eastern Austria. A catalogue of the Batthyany library from 1743 lists an item described as Hungarian prayers in one volume, and many researchers suspect that entry refers to the codex, pushing its documented existence back almost a century. Nothing before that has ever been traced.
Sign up and get your first month completely free — unlimited access to the entire archive, ad-free for subscribers. Cancel anytime.
Subscribe — first month free