Thoth: Who Was the Egyptian God of Writing and Wisdom?
Egypt's ibis-headed god of writing, the moon and secret knowledge, later fused with Hermes into a legendary sage.
Thoth, Djehuty in Egyptian, was the ibis-headed god of writing, knowledge, the moon and measurement. The Greeks equated him with Hermes, and from that fusion came Hermes Trismegistus.
Thoth, in Egyptian Djehuty, was the god of writing, knowledge, the moon, and measurement. He was shown as a man with the head of an ibis, or as a baboon. He was the scribe of the gods, the inventor of hieroglyphs, and the recorder at the judgment of the dead, writing down the result as the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat. His main cult center was Khemenu, which the Greeks called Hermopolis.
Stories gave him hidden writings. A demotic tale about Setne Khamwas, a son of Ramesses II, tells of a Book of Thoth hidden in a series of nested boxes at the bottom of the Nile near Coptos, containing spells to understand the speech of animals and see the gods. Reading it brought disaster on the man who took it.
Plato's Phaedrus preserves a Greek version. The god Theuth brings writing to King Thamus, who objects: "this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories." The Greeks equated Thoth with their own Hermes, and from that fusion came Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great author of the Hermetic writings.
At sites such as Tuna el-Gebel and Saqqara, millions of mummified ibises were buried as offerings to him. In the 20th century, Doreal's Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean reinvented him as a priest-king of Atlantis, an idea with no basis in Egyptian sources. No Egyptian text ever mentions Atlantis at all.
Millions of mummified ibis birds were buried in catacombs as offerings to Thoth.
In Egyptian sources Thoth is a god of the scribal class; the Atlantean Thoth is a 20th-century invention and the Greek Hermes link is a later Hellenistic fusion.
