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71-573: The name of the codex is often spelled 'Rohonczi', according to the old Hungarian orthography that was reformed in the first half of the 19th century. This spelling has become widespread, likely due to a book published on the codex by V. Enăchiuc in 2002. Today, the name of the codex is often written in Hungarian as 'Rohonci kódex' . The codex was named after the city of Rohonc, in Western Hungary (now Rechnitz , Austria ), where it

142-509: A 'code system'. According to Tokai and Király, the code system does not indicate the inner structure of words. They claim that the codex contains the date 1593 CE as a probable reference to its writing. They also state that by character it is an ordinary Catholic reader or breviary of the time, mostly containing paraphrases of New Testament texts (primarily from the Gospels), but also some non-Biblical material, like e.g. Seth returning to

213-401: A certain 11th-century voivode  (prince) named  Vlad and following rulers are also mentioned (regnal years in brackets): Constantine Doukas (1059-1067), Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) and Robert of Flanders (which one, Robert I (1071-1093) or Robert II (1093-1111)?). Quotations from Enăchiuc's translation include: Solrgco zicjra naprzi olto co sesvil cas "O Sun of

284-476: A cipher, a shorthand system, or a constructed language . Láng assessed these possibilities systematically in his publications with the help of historical analogies. In 2010, Gábor Tokai published a series of three short articles in the Hungarian popular science weekly, Élet és Tudomány . Tokai tried to date the codex by finding historical analogies of the imagery of the drawings. Tokai could not rule out

355-437: A close examination of the physical attributes of a codex, it is sometimes possible to match up long-separated elements originally from the same book. In 13th-century book publishing , due to secularization, stationers or libraires emerged. They would receive commissions for texts, which they would contract out to scribes, illustrators, and binders, to whom they supplied materials. Due to the systematic format used for assembly by

426-556: A doctor in Pest , but his interest in literature absorbed his attention, and he published a handbook on Hungarian poetry in 1828. He travelled to Berlin, London, and Paris, returning in 1830. From 1833 to 1844 he was a professor of dietetics at Pest University, and in 1836 helped found the Kisfaludy Society . He changed his name to Toldy in 1846. He had used it as a pseudonym from the beginning of his career. He had already joined

497-1023: A literary work (not just a single copy) being published in codex form, though it was likely an isolated case and was not a common practice until a much later time. In his discussion of one of the earliest parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat's notion when stating, "its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory", and that "early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt." Early codices of parchment or papyrus appear to have been widely used as personal notebooks, for instance in recording copies of letters sent (Cicero Fam. 9.26.1). Early codices were not always cohesive. They often contained multiple languages, various topics and even multiple authors. "Such codices formed libraries in their own right." The parchment notebook pages were "more durable, and could withstand being folded and stitched to other sheets". Parchments whose writing

568-475: A number of times, often twice- a bifolio , sewing, bookbinding , and rebinding. A quire consisted of a number of folded sheets inserting into one another- at least three, but most commonly four bifolia, that is eight sheets and sixteen pages: Latin quaternio or Greek tetradion, which became a synonym for quires. Unless an exemplar (text to be copied) was copied exactly, format differed. In preparation for writing codices, ruling patterns were used that determined

639-451: A right-to-left, top-to-bottom order, with pages also ordered right-to-left; Gyürk also identified numbers in the text. His later remarks suggest that he also has many unpublished conjectures, based on a large amount of statistical data. Miklós Locsmándi did some computer-based research on the text in the mid-1990s. His research findings were consistent with the work published by Gyürk. Locsmándi added several others conjectures. He claimed

710-400: A scroll, which uses sequential access ). The Romans used precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings. Two ancient polyptychs , a pentaptych and octoptych excavated at Herculaneum , used a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on of thongs or cords. A first evidence of the use of papyrus in codex form comes from

781-517: Is mostly like the beginning of an apocryphal gospel (previously unknown), with a meditative prologue, then going on to the infancy narrative of Jesus. According to Mahesh Kumar Singh, the upper two rows of page 1 read: he bhagwan log bahoot garib yahan bimar aur bhookhe hai / inko itni sakti aur himmat do taki ye apne karmo ko pura kar sake "Oh, my God! Here the people is very poor, ill and starving, therefore give them sufficient potency and power that they may satisfy their needs." Singh's attempt

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852-568: Is no relation between the illustrations of the manuscript (of clear Christian content) and Enăchiuc's translation. Another alleged solution was made in 2004 by the Indian Mahesh Kumar Singh. He claims that the codex is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom with a so far undocumented variant of the Brahmi script. He transliterated the first 24 pages of the codex to get a Hindi text which was translated to Hungarian. His solution

923-473: Is no widely accepted and convincing translation or interpretation of the text. No hypothesis as to the language of the codex has been backed as a universal solution, though a number – such as Hungarian , Dacian , early Romanian or Cuman , and even Hindi – have been proposed. In 1892, Némäti discussed the codex's authenticity to the Hungarian language and the possibility that it is a paleo-Hungarian script. It has been proposed that there are resemblances to

994-543: The amatl paper . There are significant codices produced in the colonial era, with pictorial and alphabetic texts in Spanish or an indigenous language such as Nahuatl . In East Asia , the scroll remained standard for far longer than in the Mediterranean world. There were intermediate stages, such as scrolls folded concertina -style and pasted together at the back and books that were printed only on one side of

1065-468: The Heian period (794–1185) were made of paper. The ancient Romans developed the form from wax tablets . The gradual replacement of the scroll by the codex has been called the most important advance in book making before the invention of the printing press . The codex transformed the shape of the book itself, and offered a form that has lasted ever since. The spread of the codex is often associated with

1136-521: The Latin word caudex , meaning "trunk of a tree", "block of wood" or "book". The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented, although new finds add three centuries to its history (see below). In Egypt , by the fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature. The change from rolls to codices roughly coincides with

1207-472: The Middle Ages . The scholarly study of these manuscripts is sometimes called codicology . The study of ancient documents in general is called paleography . The codex provided considerable advantages over other book formats, primarily its compactness, sturdiness, economic use of materials by using both sides ( recto and verso ), and ease of reference (a codex accommodates random access , as opposed to

1278-458: The Nag Hammadi library , hidden about AD 390, all texts (Gnostic) are codices. Despite this comparison, a fragment of a non-Christian parchment codex of Demosthenes ' De Falsa Legatione from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt demonstrates that the surviving evidence is insufficient to conclude whether Christians played a major or central role in the development of early codices—or if they simply adopted

1349-573: The Old Hungarian script , also referred to as 'Hungarian runes' ( "rovásírás" ). In 2004, Singh and Bárdi discussed the possibly of it being a version of the Brahmi script. It has been proposed that similar characters or symbols are engraved in the caves of the Scythian monks in the Dobruja region of Romania . It has also been proposed that there is a resemblance of some letters of

1420-677: The Ptolemaic period in Egypt, as a find at the University of Graz shows. Julius Caesar may have been the first Roman to reduce scrolls to bound pages in the form of a note-book, possibly even as a papyrus codex. At the turn of the 1st century AD, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire . Theodore Cressy Skeat theorized that this form of notebook

1491-402: The incipit , before the concept of a proper title developed in medieval times. Though most early codices were made of papyrus, the material was fragile and supplied from Egypt, the only place where papyrus grew. The more durable parchment and vellum gained favor, despite the cost. The codices of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) had a similar appearance when closed to

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1562-617: The late Middle Ages ] were written in gold and silver ink on parchment...dyed or painted with costly purple pigments as an expression of imperial power and wealth." As early as the early 2nd century, there is evidence that a codex—usually of papyrus—was the preferred format among Christians . In the library of the Villa of the Papyri , Herculaneum (buried in AD 79), all the texts (of Greek literature) are scrolls (see Herculaneum papyri ). However, in

1633-403: The libraire , the structure can be used to reconstruct the original order of a manuscript. However, complications can arise in the study of a codex. Manuscripts were frequently rebound, and this resulted in a particular codex incorporating works of different dates and origins, thus different internal structures. Additionally, a binder could alter or unify these structures to ensure a better fit for

1704-427: The 1830s) which deceived even some of the most renowned Hungarian scholars of the time. Since then, this opinion of forgery has been maintained by mainstream Hungarian scholarship, even though there is no evidence connecting the codex to Nemes specifically. A strictly methodical investigation of the symbols was first done in 1970 by Ottó Gyürk, who examined repeated sequences to find the direction of writing, arguing for

1775-408: The 21st century. How manufacturing influenced the final products, technique, and style, is little understood. However, changes in style are underpinned more by variation in technique. Before the 14th and 15th centuries, paper was expensive, and its use may mark off the deluxe copy. The structure of a codex includes its size, format/ ordinatio (its quires or gatherings), consisting of sheets folded

1846-474: The European codex, but were instead made with long folded strips of either fig bark ( amatl ) or plant fibers, often with a layer of whitewash applied before writing. New World codices were written as late as the 16th century (see Maya codices and Aztec codices ). Those written before the Spanish conquests seem all to have been single long sheets folded concertina -style, sometimes written on both sides of

1917-685: The Greek charter of the Veszprémvölgy Nunnery (Hungary). The codex was studied by Hungarian scholar Ferenc Toldy around 1840, and later by Pál Hunfalvy and by Austrian paleography expert Albert Mahl. Josef Jireček and his son, Konstantin Josef Jireček , both university professors in Prague , studied 32 pages of the codex in 1884–1885. In 1885, the codex was sent to Bernhard Jülg, a professor at Innsbruck University . Mihály Munkácsy ,

1988-534: The Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document was the continuous scroll , which was the dominant form of document in the ancient world . Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina , in particular the Maya codices and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages. In Japan, concertina-style codices called orihon developed during

2059-555: The celebrated Hungarian painter, also took the codex with him to Paris in the years 1890–1892 to study it. In 1866, Hungarian historian Károly Szabó (1824–1890) proposed that the codex was a hoax by Sámuel Literáti Nemes (1796–1842), a Transylvanian -Hungarian antiquarian, and co-founder of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest. Nemes is known to have created many historical forgeries (mostly made in

2130-443: The code. In 2011 he demonstrated a method for cutting down the text into sentences with a good probability. He identified a 7-page section split by numbered headings, with the whole section preceded by its table of contents. Like Tokai, Király also discovered the codes of the four evangelists, and in addition he provided a persuasive argument for a "chapter heading system" in the codex that contains biblical references. He also dealt with

2201-458: The codes of the four evangelists in biblical references, built up of an evangelist's name and a number, possibly some kind of chapter number . Based on Gyürk's and Locsmándi's work he also showed that many of the four-digit numbers in the text are year numbers, using presumably a peculiar Anno Mundi epoch . Simultaneous with, and independently from Tokai, Levente Zoltán Király made significant progress in describing some structural elements of

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2272-452: The codex is not a hoax; however, seeing the regularities of the text, he rejected that it be pure gibberish. Attila Nyíri of Hungary proposed a solution in 1996 after studying two pages of the codex. He turned the pages upside down, identified a Sumerian ligature, and then associated Latin alphabet letters to the rest of the symbols by resemblance. However, he sometimes transliterated the same symbol with different letters, and conversely,

2343-437: The codex is very different to that of producing and attaching the case. The first stage in creating a codex is to prepare the animal skin. The skin is washed with water and lime but not together. The skin is soaked in the lime for a couple of days. The hair is removed, and the skin is dried by attaching it to a frame, called a herse. The parchment maker attaches the skin at points around the circumference. The skin attaches to

2414-482: The copying occurred. The layout (size of the margin and the number of lines) is determined. There may be textual articulations, running heads , openings, chapters , and paragraphs . Space was reserved for illustrations and decorated guide letters. The apparatus of books for scholars became more elaborate during the 13th and 14th centuries when chapter, verse, page numbering , marginalia finding guides, indexes , glossaries , and tables of contents were developed. By

2485-428: The date of the text, however, since it may have been transcribed from an earlier source, or the paper could have been used long after it was produced. Taking a clue from the illustrations, Láng speculates it was most likely created sometime in the 16th-17th centuries. As the existence of the codex has become more widely known, since the 19th Century, the codex has been studied by many scholars and amateurs. However, there

2556-434: The experiments of earlier centuries, scrolls were sometimes unrolled horizontally, as a succession of columns. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a famous example of this format, and it is the standard format for Jewish Torah scrolls made to this day for ritual use. This made it possible to fold the scroll as an accordion. The next evolutionary step was to cut the folios and sew and glue them at their centers, making it easier to use

2627-466: The flesh side. This was not the same style used in the British Isles, where the membrane was folded so that it turned out an eight-leaf quire, with single leaves in the third and sixth positions. The next stage was tacking the quire. Tacking is when the scribe would hold together the leaves in quire with thread. Once threaded together, the scribe would then sew a line of parchment up the "spine" of

2698-426: The form (as opposed to the scroll), as well as the convenience with which such a book can be read on a journey. In another poem by Martial, the poet advertises a new edition of his works, specifically noting that it is produced as a codex, taking less space than a scroll and being more comfortable to hold in one hand. According to Theodore Cressy Skeat , this might be the first recorded known case of an entire edition of

2769-499: The format to distinguish themselves from Jews . The earliest surviving fragments from codices come from Egypt, and are variously dated (always tentatively) towards the end of the 1st century or in the first half of the 2nd. This group includes the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 , containing part of St John's Gospel, and perhaps dating from between 125 and 160. In Western culture , the codex gradually replaced

2840-594: The gate of Paradise , or prayers to the Virgin Mary . In chronological order Codex The codex ( pl. : codices / ˈ k oʊ d ɪ s iː z / ) was the historical ancestor format of the modern book . Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum , parchment , or papyrus , rather than paper . By convention,

2911-419: The herse by cords. To prevent it from being torn, the maker wraps the area of the skin attached to the cord around a pebble called a pippin. After completing that, the maker uses a crescent shaped knife called a lunarium or lunellum to remove any remaining hairs. Once the skin completely dries, the maker gives it a deep clean and processes it into sheets. The number of sheets from a piece of skin depends on

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2982-401: The layout of each page. Holes were prickled with a spiked lead wheel and a circle. Ruling was then applied separately on each page or once through the top folio. Ownership markings, decorations, and illumination are also a part of it. They are specific to the scriptoria , or any production center, and libraries of codices. Watermarks may provide, although often approximate, dates for when

3053-405: The live let write what span the time" Deteti lis vivit neglivlu iti iti itia niteren titius suonares imi urast ucen "In great numbers, in the fierce battle, without fear go, go as a hero. Break ahead with great noise, to sweep away and defeat the Hungarian!" On the one hand, Enăchiuc's proposition can be criticized for the method of transliteration. Symbols that characteristically appear in

3124-680: The manuscript to protect the tacking. The materials codices are made with are their support, and include papyrus, parchment (sometimes referred to as membrane or vellum), and paper. They are written and drawn on with metals, pigments , and ink . The quality, size, and choice of support determine the status of a codex. Papyrus is found only in late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages . Codices intended for display were bound with more durable materials than vellum. Parchment varied widely due to animal species and finish, and identification of animals used to make it has only begun to be studied in

3195-521: The membrane, whether they are from the original animal, human error during the preparation period, or from when the animal was killed. Defects can also appear during the writing process. Unless the manuscript is kept in perfect condition, defects can also appear later in its life. Firstly, the membrane must be prepared. The first step is to set up the quires. The quire is a group of several sheets put together. Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham point out, in "Introduction to Manuscript Studies", that "the quire

3266-400: The new binding. Completed quires or books of quires might constitute independent book units- booklets, which could be returned to the stationer, or combined with other texts to make anthologies or miscellanies. Exemplars were sometimes divided into quires for simultaneous copying and loaned out to students for study. To facilitate this, catchwords were used- a word at the end of a page providing

3337-684: The next page's first word. Ferenc Toldy Ferenc Toldy (born Franz Karl Joseph Schedel , August 10, 1805, in Buda - December 10, 1875, in Budapest ) was a literary critic from the Austrian Empire and later Austria-Hungary . As a small boy, he lived with his parents, Franz Schedel and Josepha Thalherr , in Buda. He was sent to school in Cegléd . He studied medicine and practised as

3408-469: The overall structure of the codex, showing that the chapter structure is not present in the first fourth of the book, partly because that part contains the long, continuous narration of the passion of Jesus Christ . In 2018, Tokai and Király published the paper Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex. The paper claimed the writing was not a substitution cipher , or an ancient alphabet, but is in fact

3479-551: The paper. This replaced traditional Chinese writing mediums such as bamboo and wooden slips , as well as silk and paper scrolls. The evolution of the codex in China began with folded-leaf pamphlets in the 9th century, during the late Tang dynasty (618–907), improved by the 'butterfly' bindings of the Song dynasty (960–1279), the wrapped back binding of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368),

3550-422: The papyrus or vellum recto-verso as with a modern book. Traditional bookbinders would call one of these assembled, trimmed and bound folios (that is, the "pages" of the book as a whole, comprising the front matter and contents) a codex in contradistinction to the cover or case, producing the format of book now colloquially known as a hardcover . In the hardcover bookbinding process, the procedure of binding

3621-477: The possibility of a hoax, but he (like Locsmándi) insisted that whatever be the case, the text has regularities that strongly suggest a meaning. Several months later Tokai also published two further short articles in which he started to give meaning to specific code chunks. He based his arguments mainly on character strings that appear in pictures (such as the INRI inscription on the cross). He claimed to have identified

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3692-565: The rise of Christianity , which early on adopted the format for the Bible . First described in the 1st century of the Common Era, when the Roman poet Martial praised its convenient use, the codex achieved numerical parity with the scroll around 300 CE, and had completely replaced it throughout what was by then a Christianized Greco-Roman world by the 6th century. The word codex comes from

3763-549: The same context throughout the codex are regularly transliterated with different letters, so that the patterns in the original code are lost in the transliteration. On the other hand, Enăchiuc is criticized as a linguist and historian. She provided the only linguistic source of a hitherto unknown state of the Romanian language , and her text (even with her glossary) raises such serious doubts both in its linguistic and historic authenticity that they render her work unscientific. There

3834-433: The same letter was decoded from several symbols. Even then he had to rearrange the order of the letters to produce meaningful words. The text, if taken as meaningful, is of religious, perhaps liturgical character. Its beginning, according to Nyíri, reads: Eljött az Istened. Száll az Úr. Ó. Vannak a szent angyalok. Azok. Ó. "Your God has come. The Lord flies. Oh. There are the holy angels. Them. Oh." Nyíri's proposition

3905-640: The scroll. Between the 4th century, when the codex gained wide acceptance, and the Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th century, many works that were not converted from scroll to codex were lost. The codex improved on the scroll in several ways. It could be opened flat at any page for easier reading, pages could be written on both front and back ( recto and verso ), and the protection of durable covers made it more compact and easier to transport. The ancients stored codices with spines facing inward, and not always vertically. The spine could be used for

3976-780: The size and the assumed content of the volume described fit the codex, but no further information is given in the catalogue, rendering an exact match to the codex impossible. The Rohonc Codex is located in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . Special permission is needed to study the codex. However, a microfilm copy is available. In 2015, the codex was rescanned by Hamburg University , but only eight higher resolution pages were published. The codex has 448 paper pages measuring 12 by 10 centimetres (4.7 in × 3.9 in), with each page having between 9 and 14 rows of symbols, which may or may not be letters. Besides

4047-424: The size of the skin and the final product dimensions. For example, the average calfskin can provide three-and-a-half medium sheets of writing material, which can be doubled when they are folded into two conjoint leaves, also known as a bifolium . Historians have found evidence of manuscripts in which the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern membrane makers. Defects can often be found in

4118-526: The stitched binding of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912), and finally the adoption of Western-style bookbinding in the 20th century. The initial phase of this evolution, the accordion-folded palm-leaf-style book, most likely came from India and was introduced to China via Buddhist missionaries and scriptures . Judaism still retains the Torah scroll , at least for ceremonial use. Among

4189-444: The symbol "i" to be a sentence delimiter (but also the symbol of 11 (eleven), and possibly also a place value delimiter in numbers). He studied the diacritics of the symbols (mostly dots), but found no peculiar system in their usage. As he could see no traces of case endings (which are typically characteristic to the Hungarian language ), he assumed that the text was probably in a language different from Hungarian. He could not prove that

4260-401: The symbols in the codex might not be an alphabet, but instead a syllabary , or be logographic in nature, such as Chinese characters . The justification of the right margin would seem to imply the symbols were written from right to left. Study of the paper on which the codex is written shows that it is most probably a Venetian paper made in the 1530s. This does not provide certainty as to

4331-562: The term is also used for any Aztec codex (although the earlier examples do not actually use the codex format), Maya codices and other pre-Columbian manuscripts. Library practices have led to many European manuscripts having "codex" as part of their usual name, as with the Codex Gigas , while most do not. Modern books are divided into paperback (or softback) and those bound with stiff boards, called hardbacks . Elaborate historical bindings are called treasure bindings . At least in

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4402-553: The text had been written in the Vulgar Latin dialect of Dacia , and the direction of writing is right-to-left, bottom-to-top. The alleged translation indicates that the text is an 11-12th century CE history of the Blaki ( Vlachs ) people in their fights against Hungarians and Pechenegs . Toponyms and hydronyms appear as Arad , Dridu , Olbia , Ineu , Rarău , Nistru ( Dniester ) and Tisa ( Tisza ). Diplomatic contacts between

4473-526: The text was entered and with vertical bounding lines that marked the boundaries of the columns. From the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages, different styles of folding the quire came about. For example, in continental Europe throughout the Middle Ages, the quire was put into a system in which each side folded on to the same style. The hair side met the hair side and the flesh side to

4544-467: The text, there are 87 illustrations that include religious, laic, and military scenes. The crude illustrations seem to indicate an environment where Christian , pagan , and Muslim religions coexist, as the symbols of the cross , crescent , and sun/ swastika are all present. The number of symbols used in the codex is about ten times higher than any known alphabet, with Némäti (1889) having counted 792, but most symbols are used with little repetition, so

4615-447: The transition from papyrus to parchment as the preferred writing material, but the two developments are unconnected. In fact, any combination of codices and scrolls with papyrus and parchment is technically feasible and common in the historical record. Technically, even modern notebooks and paperbacks are codices, but publishers and scholars reserve the term for manuscript (hand-written) books produced from late antiquity until

4686-426: Was immediately criticised by Ottó Gyürk , pointing to the fact that with such a permissive deciphering method one can get anything out of the code. Also, the mere fact that Nyíri makes an uncritical allusion to the fringe theory that the Hungarian language descended from Sumerian discredits his enterprise. A proposed translation was published in 2002 by Romanian philologist Viorica Enăchiuc . Enăchiuc claimed that

4757-407: Was immediately criticized in the next issue of the same journal. His transliteration lacks consistency. Benedek Láng summarized the previous attempts and the possible research directions in a 2010 article and in a 2011 book-sized monograph. He argued that the codex is not a hoax (as opposed to mainstream Hungarian academic opinion), but instead is a consciously encoded or enciphered text. It may be:

4828-585: Was invented in Rome and then spread rapidly to the Near East. Codices are described in certain works by the Classical Latin poet, Martial . He wrote a series of five couplets meant to accompany gifts of literature that Romans exchanged during the festival of Saturnalia . Three of these books are specifically described by Martial as being in the form of a codex; the poet praises the compendiousness of

4899-470: Was kept until 1838, when it was donated to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences by Gusztáv Batthyány , a Hungarian count , together with his entire library. The origin of the codex is unknown. A possible trace of its past may be an entry in the 1743 catalogue of the Batthyánys' Rohonc library, which reads "Magyar imádságok, volumen I in 12" ("Hungarian prayers in one volume, size duodecimo "). Both

4970-504: Was no longer needed were commonly washed or scraped for re-use, creating a palimpsest ; the erased text, which can often be recovered, is older and usually more interesting than the newer text which replaced it. Consequently, writings in a codex were often considered informal and impermanent. Parchment (animal skin) was expensive, and therefore it was used primarily by the wealthy and powerful, who were also able to pay for textual design and color. "Official documents and deluxe manuscripts [in

5041-413: Was the scribe's basic writing unit throughout the Middle Ages": Pricking is the process of making holes in a sheet of parchment (or membrane) in preparation of it ruling. The lines were then made by ruling between the prick marks.... The process of entering ruled lines on the page to serve as a guide for entering text. Most manuscripts were ruled with horizontal lines that served as the baselines on which

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