Thoth

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Thoth — Egyptian Djehuty — is the god of writing, counting, and learning in ancient Egyptian religion: the scribe who records the words of the gods, the reckoner of time, and the one who fixes the boundaries of things. He is shown as a man with the head of an ibis, or as a baboon, and he carries the palette and reed of the scribe. His cult center was Hermopolis in Middle Egypt — the “city of Hermes” to the Greeks, Khmunu to the Egyptians — where he was honored as a creator who spoke the world into being and as lord of the sacred word.

His functions cluster around language and measure. The texts credit him with the invention of writing and so of speech made permanent; he keeps the annals, sets the calendar, and divides time into its portions. He is moon to the sun of Ra, a measurer of nights, and in this office he is the great calculator, the one whose word can balance an account or settle a dispute. The Egyptians called him master of the divine words — the hieroglyphs themselves — and held that the formulae of magic and ritual derived their power from him.

Two scenes fixed his place in the religion. In the myth of Osiris he serves as the divine arbitrator, healing the injured eye of Horus and giving judgment in the quarrel of the gods, so that he becomes the type of the just secretary and advocate. In the Book of the Dead he stands at the weighing of the heart, ibis-headed beside the scales, recording the verdict as the soul’s heart is set against the feather of Maat; what he writes is what stands. To the living he was the patron of scribes, physicians, and astronomers, invoked at the start of a written work.

When Greek-speakers settled in Egypt they identified Thoth with their own Hermes — both messengers, both guides of words and of the dead — and the equation held for centuries. Out of it grew the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-greatest Hermes,” the imagined sage to whom the Hermetic writings of the early centuries CE were ascribed. That later tradition is a Greek and Egyptian compound, and the philosophy in the Hermetic texts is far removed from the pharaonic cult of the ibis-god; the continuity is real but should not be overstated. What carried across was the association itself: the god of the written word standing behind a body of writing held to be revealed. Scholars read the Hermetica as Hellenistic religious philosophy that borrowed the prestige of Egyptian antiquity; the tradition that received them took Thoth’s name, in its Greek dress, as the seal of a wisdom older than Greece.

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→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Dendera · Gnosis