This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A script's letterforms can testify against a claim even when no document survives to argue the point directly, and the Theban alphabet's own shapes are exactly that kind of witness. Joseph Peterson, working through the manuscript history of the Sworn Book of Honorius, observed that the Theban letters are built on the Latin alphabet's own basic strokes, not on Greek. That is a small technical observation with a large consequence: a script devised by a magician working in Thebes, as the traditional ascription implies, would be expected to show some relationship to the Greek alphabet actually used in that city, or to Coptic, and the Theban letters show neither. What they look like is a European cipher alphabet built by someone who already read Latin, using Latin letterforms as scaffolding and disguising them just enough to pass as foreign.
That observation does not name who actually made the alphabet. It only clears the ground: the traditional ascription to a magician named Honorius of Thebes rests on a citation that cannot currently be traced, and the letters themselves point toward a Latin-literate deviser rather than a Greek-speaking one, which is not the same as identifying that deviser. No manuscript witness to the script earlier than Trithemius's own 1518 printing has yet been found, so whether an older tradition existed and simply went unwritten before him, or whether the alphabet is his own generation's invention entirely, remains open. The atlas records that gap honestly as an open question rather than filling it with the confident sentence popular occult literature has been repeating since 1518.