Thoth

Thoth, shown as an ibis or an ibis-headed man and associated with the moon, is the Egyptian god of writing, wisdom, reckoning and the measurement of time, credited with inventing the sacred script (the medu netjer, the god's words, which the Greeks called hieroglyphs) and with recording all knowledge. His functions follow from that: he is the scribe who writes down the verdict at the weighing of the heart, the arbitrator who settles the disputes of the gods, the measurer of time who fixes the calendar, and the master of the words of power that make Egyptian magic work. Scribes, whose literacy set them apart in Egyptian society, honoured him as their patron, and a scribe might pour out a drop of water before writing as a libation to Thoth.

One of the best-attested Egyptian myths about the calendar itself turns on Thoth. According to the account preserved by the Greek writer Plutarch, the sun-god Ra, angry at the sky-goddess Nut, cursed her to be unable to give birth on any day of the 360-day year; Thoth, in his role as the clever, wise arbiter, won at a game of chance against the moon and gained enough extra light to create five additional days outside the regular year, the epagomenal days, on which Nut was then able to bear Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys and, in some versions, Horus the Elder. The myth doubles as an explanation for the 365-day Egyptian civil calendar's extra five days beyond twelve even lunar months.

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.