Rohonc Codex

It took two amateur codebreakers, an art historian and a software developer, to show that was wrong.

The Codex takes its name from Rohonk, a town in western Hungary that's now Rechnitz, just across the border in Austria.

It was a seat of the Bathiani family, and in 1838, Count Gustav Bathiani donated the family library, roughly 30,000 volumes, to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Nothing is known about where the Codex came from before that.

The only possible earlier trace is a line in a 1743 catalog of the Rohonk Library listing a single volume of Hungarian prayers, which fits the size and subject but proves nothing.

The book has 224 surviving leaves, so 448 pages, each roughly 12 by 10 centimeters.

It appears that the writer drew the next chapter's picture around it rather than waste the space.

Two pages carry marks that aren't in the code, and on one, there are the Arabic numerals 1 to 10, upside down in the bottom margin, and on another, a run of a string of Latin letters.