Thoth

Also Known As: Egyptian Djehuty, “he who is like the ibis”; Greek Thoth; identified by the Greeks with Hermes and later called Hermes Trismegistus
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Lunar god of writing, language, magic, calculation and time, who keeps the record of everything said and done among gods and mortals.
Role in Mythos: Scribe and arbiter of the divine court, healer of the wounded Eye of Horus, and the one who sets down the verdict at the weighing of the heart.
Relation to Humans: He gave people writing, reckoning and the spells that make words act on the world, and scribes and scholars worked under his authority. Pilgrims bought mummified ibises by the million to put their petitions in front of him, and the knowledge he guarded destroyed those who took it without leave.

Four million dead birds lie under the desert at Tuna el-Gebel, wrapped in linen, sealed into pottery jars, stacked along tunnels cut more than ten kilometres into the limestone. Each one was a petition. A pilgrim bought an ibis, paid to have it embalmed, and left it in the cold dark with the others so that the god whose bird it was would take notice. The arrangement ran from around the seventh century BCE until the Romans lost interest a thousand years later, which is a long time for a filing system to stay open.

The god was Djehuty, and it is his Greek name, Thoth, that stuck. Egyptian artists gave him a man’s body and the head of an ibis, and the choice was not arbitrary: the bird’s long black beak curves down to a point exactly like a reed cut for writing and dipped in ink. Sometimes he appears instead as a baboon, squat and thick-shouldered, forepaws on its knees, wearing the expression of an old man who has heard the argument before. On his head sits the full disc of the moon held in a crescent. In his hands, more often than not, are the tools of a working scribe: the rectangular wooden palette with its two wells of ink, the water pot, the reed.

He was a moon god of the accounting kind rather than the romantic kind. The moon is the thing in the sky that can be counted, and Thoth counted it, along with the stars, the seasons, the years and the hours. Plutarch preserved the sharpest version of how that started. The sun had cursed the sky goddess so that she could not give birth in any month of any year, which under the old three-hundred-and-sixty-day calendar was an airtight piece of drafting. Thoth sat down to a game of draughts with the moon and won from her a seventieth part of each of her illuminations, gathered the winnings, and out of them assembled five whole days that belonged to no month at all. On those five days Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys and the elder Horus were born. The Egyptians kept celebrating them as the birthdays of the gods long after they stopped remembering why the arithmetic worked.

His own beginning is less tidy. At Hermopolis they said he had no parents and made himself, appearing as an ibis on the first island the Ogdoad raised out of the waters of Nun and laying the egg from which everything else came. Elsewhere he is simply a son of Ra. In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, written down around 1100 BCE, he is born out of the forehead of Set, conceived from the seed of Horus in one of the ugliest and most inventive episodes in Egyptian literature. The Egyptians never bothered to settle it.

That same text puts him in the role he plays best. Horus and Set take their claim to the throne of Osiris before the assembled gods, and the case drags on for eighty years of testimony, sabotage and appeals. Thoth keeps the minutes. When Set tears out Horus’s eyes and buries them in the earth, it is Thoth who restores the eye and makes it whole again, which is why the healed eye carries a name meaning sound and unharmed. He does not win the case for anyone. He records it, corrects it, and hands it back to the court intact.

In the judgment hall the same job turns lethal. The dead man’s heart goes onto one pan of the great balance and the feather of truth onto the other, and Anubis steadies the plumb line while a composite monster waits at the foot of the scales with its jaws slightly open. The air smells of natron and burnt resin. Thoth stands to one side with his palette braced against his forearm, watching the pointer settle, and when it settles he writes. He wrote it down. That was his entire share of the proceedings, and it was the share that decided everything, because in Egypt a thing became fixed at the moment it was written.

His cult city was Khmun, the town of the Eight, which the Greeks renamed Hermopolis when they decided that this ibis-headed record keeper was their own Hermes. Under that reading he grew larger rather than smaller. Wisdom, medicine, magic and the hidden mechanics of the universe all collected around him, and by the Roman period he had become Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-great, the supposed author of a library of secret books.

One of those books has a story of its own, told in a demotic tale from the Ptolemaic period. Thoth wrote a scroll containing two spells: one to enchant the sky, the earth, the mountains and the waters, and one to let a dead man see the sun rising and the gods walking. He hid it at the bottom of the Nile near Coptos, inside a nest of boxes of iron, bronze, wood, ivory, silver and gold, with a deathless serpent coiled around the last of them. Prince Neferkaptah found it, killed the serpent three times, and read the spells. The gods took his son from him in the water, then his wife, then him. Generations later Prince Setne Khaemwaset stole the same scroll out of Neferkaptah’s tomb over the furious protest of his ghost, and was ruined by it, talked into killing his own children and walking naked before pharaoh before he understood what had happened to him. He carried the book back. The knowledge was real. So was the price.

What Thoth can do follows from what he is. Language is his instrument, and in Egypt language was not decorative: a name spoken correctly compelled, a formula written correctly worked, and the god who invented the script therefore held the operating manual for reality. He heals, because healing is a spell recited in the right order. He measures, judges, reconciles, and settles disputes among gods who could otherwise destroy each other. He remembers everything.

His limits follow just as neatly. He does not rule, he does not fight, and no version of the myth gives him a throne worth contesting. His power runs entirely through record and speech, which means it depends on somebody being present to read what he has written. He can certify a verdict but he cannot make the parties accept it, and the eighty-year lawsuit ground on around him regardless. And the knowledge he keeps is not safe. It sat at the bottom of a river inside six boxes with a serpent on top for a reason, and every mortal in the stories who reached for it got exactly what he asked for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Thoth in Egyptian mythology?

Thoth is the Egyptian god of writing, language, magic, reckoning and the moon, known in Egyptian as Djehuty. He serves as the scribe and record keeper of the gods, arbitrating their disputes and setting down the verdict at the judgment of the dead. His main cult centre was Khmun in Middle Egypt, which the Greeks renamed Hermopolis after identifying him with Hermes.

Why does Thoth have the head of an ibis?

The ibis has a long, slender beak that curves down to a point, closely resembling a reed pen dipped in ink, which suited a god whose central function was writing. Thoth’s Egyptian name, Djehuty, is generally understood as meaning something like “he who is like the ibis.” Millions of ibises were mummified as votive offerings to him, over four million of them buried in the catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel alone.

What does Thoth do at the weighing of the heart?

Thoth records the result. The dead person’s heart is weighed against the feather of truth while Anubis attends the balance, and Thoth stands by with a scribe’s palette to write down what the scales show. He does not decide the outcome, but his written record is what makes it final.

What is the Book of Thoth?

The Book of Thoth is a scroll of two spells said to have been written by the god himself, one that enchants the sky, earth, mountains and waters, and one that lets the dead see the sun and the gods. In the demotic tale of Setne Khamwas it lies at the bottom of the Nile near Coptos inside six nested boxes guarded by a deathless serpent. Everyone who takes it in the story is destroyed or disgraced by it.

Is Thoth a moon god?

Yes. Thoth is a lunar deity, usually shown wearing the full moon disc held within a crescent, and his lunar role connects directly to his responsibility for counting, calendars and time. Plutarch records that Thoth won a seventieth part of each of the moon’s illuminations at a game of draughts and used the winnings to create the five extra days on which the great gods were born.