Hermopolis Magna

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A single name carries the whole history of the place. The Egyptians called it Khmun — Khemenu, the Eight-Town, the City of the Eight — for the eight primordial deities, the Ogdoad, who were held to have stirred in the dark waters before the world began. Coptic Christians said the name as Shmun, and from their mouths it passed into Arabic as el-Ashmunein, which the village beside the ruins still answers to. Between those two endpoints stands a third name, the one that made the city matter far beyond Middle Egypt: Greek-speakers called it Hermopolis, the city of Hermes — because the god who ruled here, Thoth, the lord of writing and reckoning, was the god they recognized as their own. The Roman administration kept the Greek name on its books, and so the identification was fixed in the record of empire. What is set down here is historical and reception-history context, not an endorsement of any tradition’s claims about the place.

Khmun was old when Greeks first heard of it. Thoth’s cult of the written word, of number and measure and the just verdict, is attested from the earliest pharaonic centuries, and the city was already one of the capitals of Egyptian theology in the Old Kingdom. Its priesthood taught that creation began here: that the Ogdoad — four pairs of male and female powers standing for the formless beginning, the deep, the dark, the boundless, and the hidden — laid the first mound and raised the first sun from the marsh at Khmun. This was the Hermopolitan account of origins, set beside rather than under the rival systems of other cities — the sun-cosmogony of Heliopolis with its Ennead and its benben stone, and the craftsman-creator of Memphis. Each great cult center told the making of the world in the voice of its own lord, and at Khmun that voice was Thoth’s: utterance before existence, and the god of utterance at the head of things.

The city that Greeks renamed

The renaming of Khmun is the clearest single instance of the process that gave the Hellenistic world its mixed gods — the practice of interpretatio graeca, by which Greeks settling in a foreign country found their own deities wearing local faces. Thoth and Hermes were a natural pair: both were messengers and guides of the dead, both presided over language, eloquence, and the crossing of boundaries. A Greek who met the ibis-headed scribe of Khmun did not see a foreign god so much as Hermes in Egyptian dress, and so the city of the scribe-god became the city of Hermes. This was syncretism in its most administrative form: not a poet’s metaphor but a name on a tax register, a nome capital — the Hermopolite nome — running its sacred and civil business under a Greek title that wrote an Egyptian-Greek equation into the machinery of the state.

The pairing of Thoth and Hermes is the soil from which a far larger figure grew. By the second century BCE the priests of the ibis cult here were conducting the god’s affairs in Greek; minutes of that cult dated to 172 BCE survive, naming him in Hellenized form. Late Period and Demotic inscriptions hailed Thoth with a tripled epithet — great, great, great — which Greek compressed into a single word, Trismegistos, thrice-greatest. Out of that fused god, Thoth-Hermes crowned with a Greek superlative, emerged Hermes Trismegistus, the sage to whom the philosophical and technical Hermetica of Roman Egypt were ascribed — the dialogues of cosmic knowledge gathered into the Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. The standard modern reconstruction, set out in Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986), places those treatises at a great distance from the pharaonic ibis-cult: they belong to the Greco-Egyptian religious world of the first three centuries CE, where Greek school-philosophy met the prestige of Egyptian antiquity. But the name that authorized them carried the address of this city in it. When a Hellenized reader of the Roman East — the cultural moment of the Second Sophistic, with its hunger for ancient Eastern wisdom — reached for an Egyptian master older and deeper than Greece, the master’s title was, in effect, a citation of Khmun. Heliopolis, the other great center the Greeks renamed for one of their own — the City of the Sun — fed the same imagined Egypt of priestly star-watchers and primordial learning; but it was Hermopolis whose god gave the literature both its name and its subject, the written revelation of a scribe-deity.

The Greco-Roman city was no abstraction. It was a working provincial capital, and the dry sands of Middle Egypt have returned an extraordinary archive of its ordinary life. Papyri from the Hermopolite nome — land-registers, tax rolls, private letters, the records of city councillors and their estates — make Hermopolis one of the better-documented towns of Roman Egypt, its property disputes and grain quotas and municipal offices legible in detail across the second to fourth centuries CE. The same imperial centuries that produced the Hermetica thus left, for this one place, a second and wholly mundane corpus: a city that kept careful accounts, fitting for the seat of the god of reckoning. On the far bank of the Nile the emperor Hadrian founded a new Greek city, Antinoöpolis, in 130 CE, after his favorite Antinoüs drowned there; the two faced each other across the river, the ancient cult-city and the brand-new imperial foundation, and a causeway is said to have joined them. Hermopolis was old Egypt under a Greek name; the town opposite was Rome’s Greek dream of Egypt, raised whole on the floodplain.

The layered ground

The ruin-field at el-Ashmunein is a cross-section of Egyptian history, three and more millennia of building stacked and robbed and rebuilt on the same ground — a tell, a mound made of its own past, where each age laid its monuments over the foundations and out of the spoil of the one before. The core of it is the great temple precinct of Thoth, its sacred enclosure raised and enlarged across the New Kingdom, refurbished by the Late Period kings of the Thirtieth Dynasty, and refaced again under the Ptolemies, who gave the god’s house its final classical-Egyptian form. In front of the temple stood a pylon built by Ramesses II, and when German excavators took it apart in the 1930s they found its core packed with more than a thousand talatat — the small, easily carried sandstone blocks of the heretic king Akhenaten, brought downriver from the dismantled sun-temples of nearby Amarna and reused as cheap fill. The orthodoxy of Thoth’s city was literally built out of the rubble of the abolished cult of the Aten: a buried record, recovered block by block, of one Egyptian religious revolution and its undoing.

The scale of the cult shows in its statuary. Two colossal seated baboons of Amenhotep III, each over four meters high and carved in quartzite — the baboon being one of Thoth’s two sacred forms — once flanked an approach to the sanctuary and now stand in the open-air museum on the site, among the largest images of the god to survive. Around and over the pharaonic core lie the Greek and Roman city: a long ceremonial avenue the excavators named the Dromos of Hermes; a great Roman portico, blending Late Period and Ptolemaic forms on a plan some hundred meters long; a komasterion, the hall of the komastai, the priests who carried the divine images in procession; and the civic agora of the provincial town. The British Museum’s campaigns here, directed by A. J. Spencer and Donald Bailey between 1980 and 1990, mapped this Greco-Roman fabric in detail, building on the Hildesheim expedition that Günther Roeder had led across the 1930s, which first uncovered the temple’s hypostyle hall and the southern sacred complex.

The most arresting layer is the latest. In the fifth century CE, when the old cult had given way, a great Christian basilica was raised in the heart of the town — a cathedral of the early Egyptian church, built around 410–440 on and out of the ruins of a Ptolemaic temple, its stylobate and walls assembled from reused ancient blocks. It was a colonnaded basilica with side galleries and a transept ending in semicircular apses, its nave lined with monolithic columns of red granite crowned with Corinthian capitals — some of which, fallen for centuries, have lately been re-erected on the site. The same ground that held a precinct sacred to Thoth thus holds, a few hundred meters off, a church sacred to the God of the Christians: two successive sanctities on one patch of Middle Egyptian soil, each the center of its own world in its own age. The place answered to both, in turn; the record describes both and adjudicates between neither.

Critical study and the sources

The modern recovery of Hermopolis is the work of two long excavation traditions and a still longer scholarly one. The German campaigns under Günther Roeder (1929–1939), published as the Hermopolis volumes of the Pelizaeus-Museum at Hildesheim, exposed the temple core and the Ramesside pylon with its Amarna fill; the British Museum’s excavations under A. J. Spencer and D. M. Bailey appeared through the 1980s and 1990s as the Excavations at El-Ashmunein series, which remains the standard archaeological account of the Greco-Roman city and its great portico. The late-antique cathedral has its own technical literature, including a geo-environmental study of the early basilica’s building materials that documents the reused stone and the red-granite colonnade, and recent conservation work has reinstated several of the fallen columns.

For the god behind the city, the foundational English monograph is Patrick Boylan’s Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt (Oxford, 1922), still the starting point a century on; the connection of the local cult to the later Hermetic literature is the subject of Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986) and Brian Copenhaver’s Hermetica (1992). The city’s name and its theology run through the primary record from Plato’s Phaedrus — where Thoth appears as Theuth, inventor of letters — to the funerary tradition of the Book of the Dead, whose Hall of the Two Truths sets Thoth ibis-headed beside the scales of judgment, recording the verdict. That the city’s god could be at once the scribe of Khmun, the Hermes of the Greeks, the logos of Egypt that Plutarch describes in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, and the thrice-greatest teacher of the Hermetica is itself the measure of how much one provincial cult center came to carry.

The carrying did not stop with antiquity. The Hermes whose name began as the Greek for Khmun’s god was, by the high Middle Ages, three figures braided into one — a genealogy the Arabic doxographers worked out in detail, the so-called schema of the Three Hermeses, traced above all to Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (d. 886) and carried into Latin Europe through his astrological compendia. In that scheme the first Hermes is antediluvian, identified with the prophet Idrīs of the Qurʾan and the biblical Enoch, who preserved the sciences against the coming Flood by inscribing them on the temple walls of Upper Egypt; the second is a Babylonian Hermes who restored that knowledge after the deluge and taught Pythagoras; and the third is the Egyptian Hermes of Memphis, master of alchemy and the crafts and teacher of Asclepius. Kevin van Bladel’s The Arabic Hermes (2009) is the standard account of how that figure was assembled, drawing on late-antique chronography and Sasanian intermediaries rather than any unbroken Egyptian transmission. In every version of the scheme the Egyptian Hermes is the man of the writing-god’s country, and his wisdom is figured as a deposit carried out of Egypt. Hermopolis itself the medieval transmitters seldom named; the name had become a person, and the person had become the warrant for a whole library. The buried talatat in the Ramesside pylon and the genealogy of the Three Hermeses are two faces of one fact — that this ground stored its meanings, kept what was laid over it, and gave them up again, block by block and name by name, to whoever came to read.

The cult in the desert

The clearest surviving witness to how that cult was practiced lies a few miles west, on the desert edge, at Tuna el-Gebel — the city’s necropolis and the ground of its animal cult. Beneath the sand run rock-cut galleries that held ibises by the million and baboons by the thousand, mummified and sealed away, each a petition lodged with the god who reads everything; the catacombs were in use from the Late Period into the Roman age, an industry of devotion that drew its birds, season by season, from the marshes. Above them stands the tomb-chapel of Petosiris, a high priest of Thoth around 300 BCE, built as a small temple with a columned façade — and on its walls the two worlds of Hermopolis meet in paint: scenes of harvest and herd and craft rendered in frank Greek manner, in Hellenistic dress and posture, set over older Egyptian funerary imagery in the inner chapel, much of its color intact. In that small building the whole argument of the city is legible at a glance — an Egyptian priest of the scribe-god, buried in a Greek-inflected house of the dead, on the threshold of the centuries that would turn Thoth of Khmun into Hermes Trismegistus.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913)

→ Related: Thoth · Hermes Trismegistus · Hermes · Corpus Hermeticum · Syncretism · Heliopolis · Book Of The Dead · Isis · Asclepius · Second Sophistic