The Rohonc Codex is a small paper book of the sixteenth century, kept at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The book is written in a script that occurs in no other document.

For almost two hundred years nobody could read it. This is the first ever complete English reading of it with tests, as well as a modern English interpretation. It follows the work done by Levente Zoltán Király and Gábor Tokai — two little-known Hungarians who in 2018 likely cracked the code — and uses to extend the dictionary and readings. This project went a long way to validate that work.

Work in progress. As new information and better readings come in, the site and the book are updated. About 95% of the words are read, backed by the tests, the evidence and Király and Tokai’s own readings. Some readings, especially those with the rarest signs, will always be best guesses.

This is an attempt, not peer reviewed, and published to be checked. As of now, the tests, for what they are, find it internally consistent. Tests and all programs and documents are in the repository at github.com/styopr613/rohonc-codex.

All 441 folios · 527 pages · the translation and the evidence in one volume · version 1.18.0.

Read it here EPUB

The book

In 1838 Count Gusztáv Batthyány gave his library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In it was a small paper book, every page filled with a script found nowhere else. It had been kept at Rohonc, on the western edge of the Kingdom of Hungary; the town is Rechnitz now, in Austria. How it arrived there is a mystery. The paper is reported to be Venetian, made in the 1530s.

Old pen and wash drawing of the castle at Rechnitz with its tower, and the town on the hill beside it, captioned Rechnitz — **Long ago**Rechnitz, the castle and the town. An old drawing, undated, artist not recorded. Image from the Batthyány family’s website, batthyany.at.

Old black-and-white photograph of Schloss Rechnitz, a long building with a central clock tower and a domed cupola — **Where it was kept**Schloss Rechnitz, Hungarian Rohonc, around 1930. The Batthyány family seat; the codex sat in its library until 1838. It was largely destroyed in 1945, days after a massacre of Jewish forced laborers at Rechnitz. Photograph, anonymous, public domain.

Aerial photograph of Schloss Rechnitz and the town square in front of it — **From the air**The castle and the square before it, before 1945. Photograph, anonymous, public domain.

A facsimile of the Rohonc Codex lying open, an illuminated page on the left and lines of unknown script on the right — **The book**A facsimile of the codex, open. The original is 12 by 10 centimetres, 448 pages. Photo Klaus Schmeh, CC0.

Engraved portrait of Gusztav Batthyany in a top hat — **The donor**Gusztáv Batthyány (1803–1883), who gave his library and the codex to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1838. Illustrated London News, 5 May 1883, public domain.

Nobody could read it

The nineteenth century looked at it and gave up. In 1866 Károly Szabó called it a forgery by Samuel Literati Nemes, a known forger of antiquities, and the charge stood in the literature for a century and a half. Amateurs did not wait for permission. Attila Nyiri read the script as Sumerian. Viorica Enăchiuc published a reading of it as a history of the Vlachs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Indian scholar Mahesh Kumar Singh read it as a form of Brahmi encoding Hindi. None of these proposed translations matched the pictures, which are clearly Christian: crucifixions, an inscription above Christ on the cross, gospel scenes and an altar beneath a cross. The atlas keeps the timeline →

Christ754apostle7e1life574cross462Lord270SUBJ910say4b0three060 060 060the Baptist / woman520 060 131law285Lady574 a10 ae0dayae0believe520 b7bon the cross630 461one060crucified630 461 796that520 060 540EOL541mountb78anothera10 444 520to the mount520 b78who850Adam540 540 ae0

Lord270

The strip shows signs from the manuscript. The script runs right to left. Drag it, or use the arrows: the glass magnifies whatever sign passes under it and names this project's reading of that sign and its code. The signs drawn here are this edition's own, traced from the manuscript's ink, not taken from any font. More about the script →

052r redrawn — Folio 052r. The cross on the altar, between the two towers. The banner reads: “Here ends the evangelist’s Passion, the suffering of the Lord Jesus.” Point at a line of the banner, or tap it, to read it. Redrawn from the manuscript's own drawing; not a reproduction.

The people who found the way in

Two people, working separately, began to read it: Gábor Tokai, an art historian, from the pictures, and Levente Zoltán Király from the structure of the text. In 2018 they published “Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex” in Cryptologia, with a grammar and a dictionary. They never published a translation, and four signs in ten had no meaning in the dictionary.

Levente Zoltán Király and Gábor Tokai established what the book likely contains, as this essay largely validates. They published a dictionary of 841 signs.

This edition

This project started from the Király and Tokai dictionary. It tested the dictionary and extended it.

This was done with . Anthropic's Claude proposed readings for the remaining signs, using the Király and Tokai dictionary as a foundation. Different models assembled the gloss and composed the translation.

841signs in Király and Tokai’s dictionary

919graded readings added here, 490 of them the firmest tier

29,997words across 441 folios

95.1%of those words read

The book is in two parts. Book Two is the gloss: the manuscript folio by folio, line by line, every word marked for how well it is known. That is the evidence. Book One is the translation: a reading of the gloss into continuous English, made against the books the codex is compiled from, with every paragraph linked to its folios. Where the two disagree, Book Two is right.

What it says

The book contains the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve running into the legend of the Rood, the story of Joachim and Anne, a Passion the codex itself says it takes from Matthew and John, sermons and parables for the gospels of the year, the Finding of the Cross, the Acts of the Apostles, and at the end a few pages of one man's diary. Its opening leaves are framed as a revelation where an angel of God speaks and the prophet Elijah is the one addressed.

The fall of the rebel angels, a miniature painting — **A cup, and a fall**On folio 004r, Lucifer and a hidden cup come up again and again. That the cup is stolen rests on one guessed sign, so the theft is not shown. The fall of the rebel angels, the Limbourg brothers, 1411–1416. Public domain.

Fresco of the death of Adam and Seth at the gate of paradise — **The branch from paradise**Seth brings the branch from paradise, and Adam is healed by it. The story is old; the codex tells its own version. Piero della Francesca, 1452–1466. Public domain.

Enoch and Elijah before the Antichrist, a manuscript drawing — **Elijah, kept alive**The prophet who writes the revelation down is kept alive to return against the evil one. A French Apocalypse manuscript drawing. Public domain.

The book dates itself: 1,560 years since the Ascension, and Christ’s thirty-three years, make 1593. It also says judgment comes after “two thousand” years. Counted from the Ascension, the start the book itself uses, two thousand years ends in 2033. (The reasoning is on the Discoveries page.) At the very end are a few pages of the scribe’s own diary.

How it was checked

One test, in particular, uses a source outside the project — and offers substantial validation. Everything here reads the transcription Király and Tokai made, so no test of this project's could catch an error in it. An anonymous transcription of the codex published in 2014 — a different person, a different glyph alphabet, no word division, four years earlier — agrees with it on 91.1% of the glyphs that can be compared, against 12.9% for the same rows paired at random, and on 83.8% of the words this edition reads. The two are taken to share no common root but the book. The scan's spreads even line themselves up unasked, in the order a right-to-left book falls open.

Every test, with its bar declared before the run →

How far it reads

The manuscript contains 29,997 words. The project has a reading for 95.1% of them. 1.5% of all words are read from one passage only. 3.3% are restored in brackets. 0.1% are dark. 81.7% of lines have every word read. Lines are 99.2% complete once brackets are counted.

words in the manuscript 29997 read 28532 95.1% read from one passage only 447 1.5% restored, in brackets 981 3.3% dark 37 0.1% lines with every word read 3574 of 4372 81.7% lines complete with brackets 4335 of 4372 99.2%

This project's own readings, in its dictionary, by tier:

readings A 490 B 180 C 197 D 52 = 919 restorations in brackets, counted as a reading nowhere 847

The dictionary of added readings has 1787 entries. They are graded by how well they are known. Tier A readings survive every place the sign stands in the book, or are proved by an identical formula or a numeral. Tier B readings survive most places, with the rest unclear rather than against. Tiers C and D are read from one passage with nothing inside the book able to refuse them. Tier G is a guess, printed in brackets, and counted as read nowhere. 21 withdrawn readings stay in the file with the reason they went.

What is new here and what is not

The following paragraph states what is new here and what is not.

The grammar is Király and Tokai's: they describe it, and they print the you-Mary example this work started from. What is new is that the construction is confirmed independently of their glosses, at 12.4 and 9.8 sigma against matched controls, and then applied across the whole book to produce 1,282 readings their published dictionary does not contain. The check that matters ran in the other direction too: the composition rule, applied blind to folio 137v, reproduces their published line — sin, without, Jesus, conceive, you-Mary — in order. Which sign means which word is theirs, and is used here as fact; the English the gloss prints for each sense is this edition's own wording, not theirs.

Is it true?

The project ran tests to check its own readings. Every test's bar was declared before it ran. Failures are recorded beside passes. The summary table shows the results.

test	what it asks	result	verdict
The transcription every other test reads, checked against an independent one:
Test 16	a second, independent transcription	91.1% of glyphs agree where both can be compared, against a 12.9% control, 458.5 sigma; 83.8% of the words identical	PASS
The readings:
Test 1	source presence, evidence-excluded folios	A+B 9.4 sigma; 95% of K&T's own rate, after correcting compact folio references; selection-conditioned	reported, not a verdict
Test 5	K&T's own sentence translations	A+B 13.9 sigma; 159% of K&T	PASS
Test 6	word order, evidence-excluded folios	A+B 5.7 sigma after correcting compact folio references; selection-conditioned	reported, not a verdict
Test 2	part of speech from context	the instrument fails on K&T's own words (68.3% against a needed 70%; 4.7 sigma against a needed 5); the readings were never scored	NO VERDICT
Test 3	the blindfold, run clean	4 of 24 strict, 16.7%; the declared band for that result was 15-30%, and its declared consequence, tier C passage readings become tier D, was applied	IN BAND
Test 7	K&T's words removed	reads 11.6% from this project's readings alone, by design: the readings extend the dictionary. Recovery of a hidden K&T word: 10.8 sigma against a declared 5, on a hundred-shuffle control; the ten-shuffle runs gave 4.4 before the variant fix and 8.4 after, and all three are kept	PASS
Test 8	bootstrap from a random 30%	passage 37.6 sigma (6.0% absolute); recovery 15.3 sigma (1.0% absolute)	PASS
Test 9	hidden 70% validated by the 30%	A+B 8.9 sigma; 125% of K&T's own rate	PASS
After the outside review by Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 4.7, same day:
Test 11	passage map from K&T's words alone	median rank 25 of 1,334; top-1 12.7%; p 8e-29	PASS
Test 10	the search replayed on null books	7 / 217 / 2 signs kept at three scales; the count rule has no power at any, so it cannot tell a search from a decipherment	NO VERDICT
Test 10, held out	the same runs, scored where the readings were not derived	real book 8 sigma over shuffle; null books none	reported, not a verdict
Test 12	Test 5 rescored under the strict rule	78.8%, 13.4 sigma; but +28.0 points over K&T's own headwords trips the declared leakage clause	FAIL on that clause
Test 12b	two independent re-glossers, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 4.7	given K&T's words only and the sign blanked, they recover this project's gloss 68.4% and 71.1% of the time	PASS
Test 13	the underdetermination census	62 of 95 A/B readings have a common verb present in every chapter their folios cite, against a bar of 40%	FAIL
Test 13, the same rule	applied to the chosen glosses	0 of the 95 pass it. The rivals exist; the method did not choose them. The FAIL measures the rival space, not what the method did	reported, not a verdict
Test 14	the blind rotated run, outside reader	rotated book 0 fills, 0 matches; real book 3.8 fills a page, 13 of 18	PASS
Test 15	passage identification, outside reader	chapter level 9 of 20 against 0 of 20 shuffled; p 0.002	PASS
Test 17	memory check on Test 15's reader	asked by folio number with no page shown, it names 0 of 20 cited chapters and declines 19; Test 15's nine were not recalled by label	NO MEMORY SHOWN
Test 18	two blind models, reader and judge	K&T's known words transfer to another chapter 46.5% against 33.3% chance, p 0.015, short of the declared 0.01; the reader lands on the project's word 12.7% of the time and on K&T's 14.1%	NO VERDICT
PASS and FAIL are verdicts on the readings against a bar declared before the run. NO VERDICT means the instrument failed its own check on Király and Tokai's words, or has no power to tell a search from a decipherment; it says nothing about the readings either way, and it is kept on the page because it was specified. IN BAND is a test with declared bands rather than a bar: the result fell in the band it was predicted to, and the consequence declared for that band was applied.

What each test asked is on the tests page. The saved runs are in the data.

What is here

The scriptLearn about the script itself. AtlasMaps and timelines: Hungary in 1593, the tongues around Rohonc, where the stories came from, and the codex's own history. Summary of the glossAn English summary of the gloss, one paragraph for each written page. The book has the full text. DictionaryBrowse the dictionary of added readings. TestsSee the tests and their results. For the skepticReal language, or a Rorschach test? The case in plain words, with what it does not show. MethodRead the method, the loop that reads one unread sign. The programsEvery program behind the readings, as plain text, grouped by what it does. Sources and dataWhere every source came from, what may be done with it, and the files to download.

The edition

The book edition is in two parts. Book One is a reading edition. It is an interpretation, not a word-for-word rendering. Book Two is the gloss itself, all 441 written pages line for line with every mark. Where the two disagree, Book Two is right.

Credit and position

The manuscript is out of copyright. Király and Tokai's dictionary and transcription are theirs. The plates on this site are redrawn from the manuscript's own drawings; they are not reproductions of it. The readings, tests, English and editorial matter are this project's own. The programs are MIT and the data is CC BY 4.0, so nobody who wants to check the work is restricted; the translation and the editorial prose are CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, which allows reading, quotation and non-commercial republication whole, and reserves the commercial rights to the English text. Every figure on the site is read out of a saved run.

The English words of the gloss are this edition's. Which sign means which word is Király and Tokai's finding, used here as fact; how each sense is put in English is this edition's own, and their entries, in their own words, are in their publication.

This edition has not been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by Levente Zoltán Király or Gábor Tokai, and does not use their unpublished translation or grammar material.

Their site: rechnitzer-kodex.hu. Citations owed and the terms of every source are under Sources.

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