The Figures
Thoth
Thoth (Egyptian Djehuty) was ancient Egypt’s god of writing and wisdom; Greeks equated him with Hermes by the 5th century BCE, and his title “thrice great” made him Hermes Trismegistus. Herodotus already says that dead ibises, Thoth’s sacred birds, are taken “to the city of Hermes”, and a Demotic record of an ibis-cult meeting held in 172 BCE calls Thoth “the three times great”. The “Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” are something else: an American text of 1939.
Before there was a Hermes Trismegistus, there was Thoth (Egyptian Djehuty), a god with an ibis’s head and a scribe’s palette. He was the divine inventor of hieroglyphic writing, patron of scribes, measurer of time, and the gods’ own secretary. In the judgment scene of the Book of the Dead (the vignette of spell 125), while the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, Thoth stands at the balance and records the verdict: “scribe of the gods” was a job description before it was a metaphor.
What do we know about Thoth for certain?
Thoth appears in Egyptian sources of almost every kind, from the Pyramid Texts, Egypt’s oldest religious texts, to the end of Egyptian religion in Roman times (Stadler, 2012). The card gives each key fact, the evidence for it and its status.
| Fact | Status |
|---|---|
| Egyptian name: Djehuty (Ḏḥwtj) | Documented |
| Evidence: Stadler 2012, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology: the origin of the name is unexplained, perhaps because it is so old. | |
| Cult centres: Hermopolis Magna (Egyptian Khmun, “City of the Eight”, today el-Ashmunein) in Upper Egypt, and Hermopolis Parva in Lower Egypt | Documented |
| Evidence: Stadler 2012; Global Egyptian Museum, glossary entries Hermopolis and Ogdoad: Thoth’s temple was the most important at Hermopolis. | |
| Forms: an ibis or an ibis-headed man, and a baboon | Documented |
| Evidence: Stadler 2012: in the Pyramid Texts his name is usually written as an ibis on a standard. The oldest possible image, an ibis-headed god on a rock relief of King Khufu in Sinai, has no caption, so that identification is likely, not certain. | |
| At the weighing of the heart he records the verdict | Documented |
| Evidence: Book of the Dead, vignette of spell 125 in the papyrus of Hunefer (British Museum EA 9901), shown in Stadler 2012, fig. 4; on a mummy breastplate of the 3rd to 1st century BCE he sits on the scale as a baboon (Würzburg, Martin von Wagner Museum A 201). | |
| Greeks equate him with Hermes | Documented, 5th century BCE |
| Evidence: Herodotus (c. 484-430 BCE), Histories 2.67, tr. A. D. Godley: dead ibises are taken “to the city of Hermes”, that is, to Thoth’s Hermopolis. | |
| “The three times great”: the Egyptian title behind the Greek trismegistos | Documented, 2nd century BCE |
| Evidence: Archive of Hor of Sebennytos, from the ibis cult at North Saqqara (Ray 1976): Demotic texts call Thoth “the three times great”, among them the minutes of a meeting of the ibis-cult council held on 31 May and 1 June 172 BCE (Text 19). Hor’s Greek ostraca of 168-164 BCE have “the greatest and greatest god, the great Hermes”, the earliest unequivocal Greek form. | |
| A Demotic Book of Thoth: a dialogue on scribal and temple knowledge | Documented text; its reading is disputed |
| Evidence: Over forty papyri of the Graeco-Roman period, now in Berlin, Copenhagen, Florence, New Haven, Paris and Vienna (Jasnow and Zauzich 2005). The editors see Thoth as the teacher and the text as a forerunner of the Hermetica; Joachim Quack (2007) reads it as an initiation into the scribal profession in which no speaker is Thoth (Stadler 2012; Burns 2021). | |
| Millions of mummified ibises were offered to him | Documented; the counts are estimates |
| Evidence: About 1.75 million at Saqqara and about four million at Tuna el-Gebel, and radiocarbon dating shows that the offerings peaked between 450 and 250 BCE (Wasef and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2019); Tuna el-Gebel was the Late to Roman Period necropolis of Hermopolis (Stadler 2012). | |
| “Thoth the Atlantean” and his emerald tablets | Later invention, 20th century |
| Evidence: The earliest dated record we found is the US Catalog of Copyright Entries: “Emerald-tablets of Thoth-the-Atlantean”, by Doreal, dated 20 September 1939; two tablets “not printed previously” followed in 1948. The Atlantean origin rests on Doreal’s own preface. | |
Checked on 1 November 2026, each source at the link in the card or in the list of sources below.
Thoth, Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus: who is who?
Thoth is the Egyptian god, Hermes the Greek god whom Greeks in Egypt identified with him, and Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes”, the name that joined the two and later belonged to a legendary sage.
| Name | Who he is, and the link to Thoth |
|---|---|
| Thoth (Djehuty) | Egyptian god of writing and wisdom, lunar god, scribe and vizier of the gods The original: in Egyptian texts from the Pyramid Texts to Roman times |
| Hermes | Greek god, son of Zeus and Maia, “the luck-bringing messenger of the immortals” in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes Identified with Thoth by the 5th century BCE: Herodotus calls Thoth’s town “the city of Hermes” |
| Hermes Trismegistus | “Thrice-great Hermes”: Thoth under his Greek name, with his Egyptian title; from Roman times, the sage named as author of the Hermetic texts Demotic “the three times great” by 172 BCE; Greek “the greatest and greatest god, the great Hermes”, 168-164 BCE (archive of Hor) |
| “Thoth the Atlantean” | A character in Maurice Doreal’s text, said to have ruled Egypt from about 50,000 to 36,000 BCE No ancient source; the text dates from 1939 |
Where was Thoth worshipped?
Thoth’s chief cult centre was Khemenu (Khmun) in the 15th nome of Upper Egypt, the town the Greeks called Hermopolis, today el-Ashmunein; a second, Hermopolis Parva, lay in Lower Egypt (Stadler, 2012). The name itself is a number: Khemenu means “City of the Eight” (Global Egyptian Museum), after the town’s eight primeval gods, the Egyptian Ogdoad (Stadler, 2012), not to be confused with the eighth sphere of the Hermetic ascent.
How did the Greeks see Thoth?
The Greeks saw Thoth as their own Hermes. Settlers, recognising their divine messenger in him, called his town Hermopolis, “city of Hermes”, and the identification is older than the Ptolemies: in the 5th century BCE Herodotus already writes that dead ibises, Thoth’s sacred birds, are taken “to the city of Hermes” (Histories 2.67, tr. Godley). In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370-355 BCE) Socrates tells a story set in Egypt, the myth of Theuth: a god whose sacred bird is the ibis, the inventor of letters, offers writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory, and the king answers that it is a remedy for reminding, not for memory (274c-275b).
Where does the name Trismegistus come from?
Trismegistus, “thrice great”, translates an Egyptian title of Thoth. Demotic texts of the ibis cult at Saqqara call him “the three times great”, one of them the minutes of a meeting of the cult’s council held on 31 May and 1 June 172 BCE, and the Greek ostraca of Hor of Sebennytos, written between 168 and 164 BCE, render the title as “the greatest and greatest god, the great Hermes”: the earliest unequivocal Greek form, as their first editors concluded (Ray, 1976). The shorter “twice great” is older, with Egyptian examples from before the Greek period, and the single Greek word trismegistos came later. That translated title, carried by bilingual Egyptian priests, is the bridge from ibis-headed god to the sage credited with the Corpus Hermeticum; the story is told in full at Path step 02 and on the card for Hermes Trismegistus.
Is there a real Book of Thoth?
Yes: a Demotic text that its modern editors call the Book of Thoth survives in over forty papyri of the Graeco-Roman period (Jasnow & Zauzich, 2005), from the first and second centuries CE according to Kevin van Bladel’s review (2006). It is a dialogue between a mortal, “He-who-loves-knowledge”, and a divine teacher, “He-who-praises-knowledge”, on scribal and temple knowledge. Its editors subtitle it a “pendant to the classical Hermetica” and take the teacher to be Thoth; Joachim Quack (2007) reads it instead as a ritual of initiation into the scribal profession in which the student speaks with at least four figures, none of them Thoth (Stadler, 2012). Shared content is thin: the Book of Thoth asks whether animals have reason, and so does a Hermetic excerpt that survives only in Stobaeus (SH 4; see The Stobaean Fragments). D. M. Burns (2021), like Kevin van Bladel (2006) before him, judges the parallel probably fortuitous.
Did Thoth write the Emerald Tablets?
No: the “Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” are a 20th-century American text by Maurice Doreal, which the US Catalog of Copyright Entries dates to 20 September 1939. Maurice Doreal (died 1963; the religious name of Claude Doggins) founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple, which the finding aid of the UC Santa Barbara Library describes as a theosophical occult organization. In his preface Doreal writes that Thoth, an Atlantean priest-king, ruled Egypt from about 50,000 to 36,000 BCE and built the Great Pyramid; that priests later carried the tablets to a Maya temple in Yucatán; and that he himself translated them in 1925 before returning them to the pyramid. The tablets are known only from his account; two more, “not printed previously”, came out in 1948.
The anthropologist Jeb J. Card (2019) finds clear borrowings from H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror” and from Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”. It is also a different text from the medieval Emerald Tablet, whose most quoted line became the slogan as above, so below, although Doreal’s preface makes the same Thoth, reborn as Hermes, the author of the Emerald Tablets known to occultists, which it calls a later and far lesser work. To date a claim like this layer by layer, see Provenance. The documented Thoth (three millennia of cult, millions of mummified ibises at Saqqara and Tuna el-Gebel, a god of writing who became an author) needs no Atlantis.
In the Arabic world the Hermes tradition continued: the Emerald Tablet, a text that carries his name, first survives in Arabic, in a book attributed to Balinas.
| Egyptian name | Djehuty (Ḏḥwtj); Greek Thōth |
|---|---|
| Cult centre | Khemenu (Khmun), Hermopolis Magna to the Greeks, today el-Ashmunein |
| Sacred animals | The ibis and the baboon |
| Role | God of writing and wisdom, lunar god and vizier of the gods; scribe at the weighing of the heart |
| Greek counterpart | Hermes, identified with him by the 5th century BCE (Herodotus 2.67) |
| Epithet | “The three times great”, in Demotic by 172 BCE: the root of the Greek Trismegistos |
| Why he matters | The Egyptian half of Hermes Trismegistus, and of this whole tradition |
Fair questions
Is Thoth the same as Hermes Trismegistus?
Not the same, but the source. Greeks in Egypt equated Thoth with their god Hermes by the 5th century BCE (Herodotus, Histories 2.67), and Thoth’s Egyptian title “the three times great”, attested in Demotic by 172 BCE, became the Greek Trismegistos. Hermes Trismegistus is the Greek-Egyptian figure that grew from that identification and was later named as the author of the Hermetic books.
What was Thoth the god of?
Writing and wisdom above all. Egyptian sources also make him a moon god who reckons time, the vizier and scribe of the gods, the recorder at the judgment of the dead and, in some texts, a creator and a warrior (Stadler 2012).
Why is Thoth shown with the head of an ibis?
Because the ibis was one of his two sacred forms; the other was the baboon. Egyptian art shows him as an ibis, an ibis-headed man or a baboon, and in the Pyramid Texts his name is usually written with an ibis on a standard (Stadler 2012). Millions of mummified ibises were offered to him: about 1.75 million at Saqqara and about four million at Tuna el-Gebel (Wasef and colleagues 2019).
Did Thoth write the Emerald Tablets?
No. The “Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” is a 20th-century text by Maurice Doreal; the US Catalog of Copyright Entries dates it to 20 September 1939, and two more tablets followed in 1948. Its Atlantean origin is Doreal’s own claim, and it is a different text from the medieval Emerald Tablet.
Is the Book of Thoth real?
Yes, in one sense: a Demotic dialogue that its modern editors call the Book of Thoth survives in over forty papyri of the Graeco-Roman period (Jasnow and Zauzich 2005), though scholars disagree on whether its teacher is Thoth. It is not the scroll of the 1932 film The Mummy, which Jeb J. Card (2019) sees as probably inspired by the magic book in the Egyptian tale of Setne Khamwas, and it is not Doreal’s tablets.
Listen & watch
Sources & further reading
- Martin A. Stadler, "Thoth," UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2012), eScholarship (consulted 1 November 2026).
- Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge UP, 1986).
- Richard Jasnow & Karl-Theodor Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth: A Demotic Discourse on Knowledge and Pendant to the Classical Hermetica, 2 vols (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), publisher’s page (consulted 1 November 2026).
- The Global Egyptian Museum, glossary entry “Ogdoad” (consulted 28 October 2026).
- The Global Egyptian Museum, glossary entry “Hermopolis” (consulted 1 November 2026).
- Herodotus, Histories 2.67, tr. A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), on the Perseus Digital Library (consulted 29 October 2026).
- Plato, Phaedrus 274c-275b, tr. Harold North Fowler, Plato I, Loeb Classical Library 36 (London: Heinemann, 1913).
- J. D. Ray, The Archive of Hor, Texts from Excavations 2 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1976): Text 19 and the appendix on the titles of Thoth.
- Sally Wasef and colleagues, “Mitogenomic diversity in Sacred Ibis Mummies sheds light on early Egyptian practices”, PLOS ONE 14(11): e0223964 (2019), doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0223964.
- Kevin van Bladel, review of Jasnow and Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2006.05.19.
- D. M. Burns, “A New Volume of Perfect Words”, review of Litwa’s Hermetica II, Aries 21 (2021), pp. 271-278, at pp. 277-278 (doi:10.1163/15700593-02102003).
- Joachim Friedrich Quack, “Die Initiation zum Schreiberberuf im Alten Ägypten”, Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 36 (2007), pp. 249-295, and “Ein ägyptischer Dialog über die Schreibkunst und das arkane Wissen”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 9 (2007), pp. 259-294 (Heidelberg University repository); as cited in Stadler 2012 and Burns 2021.
- Library of Congress, Copyright Office, Catalog of Copyright Entries, New Series, Part 1, Group 2, vol. 36 (1939), entry 43954, “Emerald-tablets of Thoth-the-Atlantean”: scan at the Internet Archive.
- Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series, Part 1B, vol. 2 (1948), Doreal, “An interpretation of the emerald tablets; with the two tablets not printed previously”: scan at the Internet Archive.
- UC Santa Barbara Library, Department of Special Research Collections, Brotherhood of the White Temple, Inc. collection (ARC Mss 57), finding aid (consulted 1 November 2026).
- Maurice Doreal, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth-the-Atlantean (Brotherhood of the White Temple, 1939), preface; read in a later reprint.
- Jeb J. Card, “‘Older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx’: Egypt and the Mythic Past in Alternative Egyptology and the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft”, Journal of History and Cultures 10 (2019), pp. 22-44, at pp. 26-27 (archived copy of the issue).
- Homeric Hymn to Hermes 1-3, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914), Project Gutenberg.