Tea at Trianon: The Indecipherable Rohonc Codex

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 19, 2021

The Indecipherable Rohonc Codex

From Ancient Origins:

In total, the Rohonc Codex contains 448 pages of indecipherable text, which is similar to Old Hungarian script, as they are both written with a right-to-left orientation, and have similar combinations of straight and rounded characters. Scholars have asserted that in reality, the writing could be anything from Hindi to Old Hungarian, although it lacks features from each of those written languages. The number of different symbols used is considered to be extremely high, with ten times more symbols than are found in any known alphabet.

The paper within the Codex has the unique characteristic of being watermarked. Each page contains the watermark, which has the appearance of an anchor, which is within a circle, which is within a six-rayed star. The watermark itself appears to date to 1529-1540 AD, although the actual Codex appears to have been written much earlier than that. This discrepancy makes it difficult to determine exactly when the text was written, although it is possible that the book was transcribed after its initial creation.

The Codex contains more than just written text – it is also accompanied by 87 illustrations depicting military battles, landscapes, and religious icons, which are said to hint at several different religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Some have interpreted this to show that whichever culture was responsible for creating the text was one within which the three religions co-existed. (Read more.)