Thoth had an extraordinary second life. When Greeks settled in Egypt they identified him with their own Hermes, and out of that fusion grew Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great, the supposed ancient Egyptian sage to whom a body of Greek philosophical and occult writings, the Hermetica, was ascribed. Rediscovered and translated in Renaissance Italy, these texts were believed to preserve a primordial Egyptian wisdom older than Plato and Moses, and they shaped Renaissance magic, alchemy and Neoplatonism until the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614 that they were in fact late-antique Greek compositions. Through this line the ibis-god of the scribes became, at a great remove and under a Greek name, a patron of Western esotericism, an afterlife out of all proportion to a foreign observer's first glance.
Thoth's cult centre, Hermopolis Magna in Middle Egypt, known to Egyptians as Khmun, the city of the eight primeval deities, still preserves two colossal quartzite statues of Thoth in baboon form, raised under Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BCE and still standing at the site today, among the largest surviving cult images of any Egyptian deity in their original setting. Excavation of Hermopolis has also recovered vast archives of papyri and ostraca written in Demotic script, the everyday cursive descendant of hieroglyphs whose invention Egyptian tradition itself credited to Thoth, so that the god of writing's own city preserves an unusually direct material record of the writing system he was said to have given humanity.