The Rohonc Codex-widely regarded as the second most enigmatic encrypted manuscript in the world-has long attracted scholarly attention based on both its physical characteristics and its mysterious content. Despite considerable efforts in historical, codicological, and cryptographic research, which have rendered much of the text decipherable, numerous aspects remain obscure, chief among them the identity of its author.This article presents new findings based on a recently discovered letter, to which four previously unknown pages written in the script of the Codex were appended. This source sheds new light on the origins, transmission, and authorship of the manuscript. On the basis of this discovery, the following new claims can be advanced with a great degree of certaintyThe Codex likely entered the Batthy & aacute;ny Library, where it was ultimately preserved, around the year 1571, not in later centuries. The manuscript was in all likelihood produced in Hungary, or at least within the Central European region. Its author was an erudite individual, a de & aacute;k (scribe), rather than an unlearned genius or a religious sect. We find him in the southern territory of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1571 but his nationality or even origin remains, at this point, subject to speculation. The contemporary letter describes the author as a timid, socially awkward or unconventional figure. Invented before the year 1571, the Rohonc script constitutes an exceptionally early instance of an artificial language system-or, at the very least, an artificial writing-predating most similar efforts by several decades. It is now possible to definitively rule out the hypothesis that the Rohonc Codex is a 19th-century forgery or hoax, as its script has independently survived in at least two distinct contexts, one of which is a dated sixteenth century source. The four newly discovered pages can be read coherently using the same decryption method previously applied to the Codex, thus further validating the decipherment. Nonetheless, several key questions remain unresolved, leaving ample scope for continued investigation.
This paper is a follow-up to the authors' 2018 introductory study which presented an overview of their proposed decipherment of the Rohonc Codex. It situates the present contribution within the broader framework of the authors' proposed solution, and demonstrates, through numerous examples, how core grammatical functions are realised in the text at both the morphological and syntactic levels. While acknowledging that certain parts of the text remain unresolved, the authors argue that the cumulative evidence, such as subtle changes in the usage of prepositions and the unparalleled suffixation of verbs and pronouns, indicates that the writing represents a deliberate attempt to construct an artificial written language. As further material for evaluating this interpretation, the study also presents one of the most clearly legible passages of the codex-an interlinear translation of the biblical parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.
