Review of The Rohonc Code: Tracing a Historical Riddle by Benedek Láng

Abstract

The story of the Rohonc Code begins a little more than 180 years ago. Discovered in the collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was a mysterious codex. It is 448 pages long, handwritten with 9 to 14 lines of writing per page, and heavily illustrated with nearly 90 handdrawn images (Figure 1). Some pages at the beginning and at the end of the codex were detached, and their order was not known. The codex became part of the collection when the library of theHungarian noblemanGuszt av Batthy any was absorbed into the collection. The discovery of the manuscript created excitement in the academic world, and exploration of the writing and its meaning began. The codex was first examined in the early 1840s by J anos Jerney.