The Path, step 03

Alexandria: the world
that made the Hermetica

TL;DR

The Hermetica were written in Greek in Roman Egypt between about 100 and 300 CE by authors who wrote as Hermes Trismegistus and whose real names are unknown. Christian Bull (2018), developing a suggestion of Garth Fowden (1986), argues that at least a core of them were Egyptian priests, writing while Rome cut back the temples’ privileges and, in the third century, their funding. Alexandria, Egypt’s Greek-speaking metropolis, stands for the Greek side of the texts; much of the evidence points up the Nile, to the Nag Hammadi codices found in Upper Egypt in 1945 and to Zosimos of Panopolis, who knew Hermetic books about 300.

Every text has a home. The Hermetica’s home was not one city but Egypt under Roman rule, between about 100 and 300 CE: the world radiating from Alexandria, the Mediterranean’s great engine of Greek learning, planted on Egyptian soil, and from the temples of the Nile valley that kept an older Egyptian learning. The authors hid behind the name of Hermes Trismegistus, so where and when they wrote has to be read from the evidence around the texts.

Where and when were the Hermetica written? The evidence, dated

The Hermetica were written in Roman Egypt, most of them between about 100 and 300 CE; no treatise gives its date or its real author, so both are inferred from the Greek of the texts, their ideas and the writers who quote them. The card gives each key fact, the evidence for it and its status.

Fact	Status
Egypt is under Roman rule from 30 BCE	Documented
Evidence: Augustus writes in the Res gestae (27) that he added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people (Aegyptum imperio populi Romani adieci, Latin text). In August 30 BCE Octavian pursued Antony and Cleopatra to Egypt, where both died by their own hand in Alexandria (Bowman 1996, Cambridge Ancient History X); he dated Egypt’s absorption into his empire from that year (Copenhaver 1992, p. xviii).
The Greek Hermetica were written between about 100 and 300 CE	Inferred by scholars; no treatise is dated
Evidence: In 1614 Isaac Casaubon dated the treatises of Hermes to about the end of the first century CE from their late Greek and their borrowings from Plato; Walter Scott (1924) put most of them in the third century and few long before 200, judging from their kind of Platonism and from early readers such as Lactantius, who quoted them in Greek between 303 and 311 (Scott, vol. I, pp. 41-42, 92-94). Christian Bull places them in the first three centuries CE (University of Bergen notice of his thesis, 2014; Burns 2025, p. 105).
Nag Hammadi Codex VI, found in Upper Egypt in 1945, holds three Hermetic works in Coptic; it was made in the 4th or 5th century	Find and contents documented; the date is argued from the covers and colophons
Evidence: The codices came to light in 1945 at the Jabal al-Tarif in Upper Egypt, near the Pachomian monasteries of Sheneset and Pbow; Hugo Lundhaug and Lance Jenott (2015) argue from the papyri reused in the covers, the scribes’ colophons and the find-spot that monks of the 4th or 5th century made and read them (Bull and Lundhaug 2023, pp. 1-3, open access). Codex VI is the only manuscript of the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth (Burns 2025, p. 110); it is followed by a Hermetic Prayer of Thanksgiving (VI,7) and a Coptic translation of Asclepius 21-29 (VI,8) (Eugene Afonasin, BMCR 2007.11.13).
Zosimos of Panopolis quotes books of Hermes about 300	Documented; the date is approximate
Evidence: Copenhaver (1992, p. xxxiv): a native of Panopolis who lived in Alexandria around 300 CE and knew the alchemical Hermetica; Panopolis is today’s Akhmim, in Upper Egypt. Scott (1924, I, p. 29): soon after 300 he had read the first and fourth Hermetic treatises (CH I and IV). In his own writing he quotes a book of Hermes On Nature and tells Theosebeia to make for Poimandres and immerse herself in his Cup (Mead 1906, vol. III, pp. 273, 284, from Berthelot’s Greek text).
Temple privileges, then temple funding, shrink under Rome	Documented trend, from Augustus to the 3rd century
Evidence: Under Augustus priestly rights of asylum and other privileges were curtailed, and the government kept strict control over priests and temple lands; in the course of the 3rd century, Dijkstra writes, the emperors seem to have reduced and then ended their financial support of the temples (Dijkstra 2005, pp. 30, 38). In 159-160 CE a priest of Soknopaios in the Fayum was reported to the Roman office of the Idios Logos, which allotted priestly posts and fined breaches of priestly rules, for wearing his hair long and woollen clothes (BGU I 16, Berlin).
The last dated hieroglyphic inscription is carved at Philae on 24 August 394	Documented
Evidence: On that day Smet, called Akhom, a sacred scribe (hierogrammateus) at Philae, dedicated Egypt’s last hieroglyphic inscription, together with a demotic text; Egypt’s last demotic inscription, also at Philae, dates from 452 (Dijkstra 2005, pp. 32, 68, thesis, University of Groningen). Copenhaver (1992, p. xx): no hieroglyphic inscription can be dated later than the end of the 4th century.
The Serapeum of Alexandria is destroyed under bishop Theophilus, in 391 or 392	Event documented; the year is disputed
Evidence: Church historians report it, among them Socrates Scholasticus, Church History V.16: at the request of Theophilus the emperor ordered the temples of Alexandria demolished, and the Serapeum was destroyed (tr. A. C. Zenos, 1890). The usual date is 391; Johannes Hahn (2004) argues for 392, and Dijkstra (2005, p. 31) follows him.
Christian Bull (2018): the authors, or a core of them, were Egyptian priests writing Greek philosophy	Scholarly argument; not settled
Evidence: Bull sets out to confirm Fowden’s tentative suggestion that Egyptian priests wrote the Hermetica or a core group of them, and argues that philosophy was the idiom in which such priests spoke to Greeks (p. 456), as summarised by Dylan M. Burns (2025, pp. 103, 111, open copy), who adds that the case leaves Greek philosophy the dominant voice of the texts (pp. 111-112). The University of Bergen’s 2014 notice of the thesis behind the book says the authors were probably Egyptian priests who wrote in Greek.

Checked on 2 November 2026, each source at the link in the card or in the list of sources below.

Who wrote the Hermetica: Greek philosophers or Egyptian priests?

No one knows the authors’ names: the treatises speak through a fixed cast, Hermes Trismegistus, Tat, Asclepius, Ammon and Agathodaimon, and Brian Copenhaver (1992, pp. xvi, xxiv) calls their writers “persons unknown to us”. What kind of people they were is the real debate. Arthur Darby Nock and André-Jean Festugière, who edited the Greek text in 1946-1954, tied the treatises firmly to Greek philosophy; Jean-Pierre Mahé, in Hermès en Haute-Égypte (1978-1982), set out to place them in the history of Egyptian literature instead (Burns 2025, p. 104). Garth Fowden (1986) suggested, tentatively, that Egyptian priests may have written them, and argued that practical and philosophical Hermetica answer to one Greco-Egyptian milieu (Burns 2025, p. 103; Copenhaver 1992, p. xxxii). Christian Bull (2018) turns that suggestion into a full case for priestly authors; his reviewer Dylan Burns (2025, pp. 111-112) praises the book but notes that whoever wrote the texts wrote Greek philosophy for readers of Greek philosophy, even if some of the authors had trained as Egyptian priests.

Why do Alexandria and Upper Egypt both matter?

Because the evidence sits at both ends of the country: Alexandria stands for the Greek side of the Hermetica, while the manuscripts and the people tied to Hermetic books point up the Nile, to Upper Egypt. Alexandria was Egypt’s largest city by far, perhaps half a million people under Augustus, and Greek culture dominated everywhere except the countryside (Copenhaver 1992, p. xx); about 200 CE Clement of Alexandria described forty-two books of Hermes that Egyptian priests held indispensable for their rites (p. xxxiii).

The only manuscript of the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth came out of the ground in 1945 at the Jabal al-Tarif, near the monasteries where, on the argument of Lundhaug and Jenott, it was made and read. Garth Fowden (1986) counted the Nag Hammadi codices and the Theban Magical Library, an archive of Greek and Demotic magical scrolls of the 3rd and 4th centuries, among the products of Upper Egyptian milieux related to that of the Hermetica (as quoted by Burns 2023, p. 280). The texts themselves point to temple towns, though no passage proves where a treatise was written. The Discourse refers to a temple in Diospolis, and Bull refuses to dismiss the reference as a cliché, since temple building at Thebes went on in the Roman period (Burns 2025, p. 110). In the Asclepius (37) Hermes says that his grandfather Hermes dwells in his native city, named after him: Hermopolis, the city of Hermes-Thoth at modern el-Ashmunein, where Lower and Upper Egypt meet (Scott 1924, I, p. 359; Copenhaver 1992, pp. xiii-xiv). Because the author of this part of the Asclepius sets the cult of Asclepius and an old cult of Egyptian kings at Crocodilopolis, Scott thought him an Egyptian, perhaps a priest, living in or near the Fayum (Scott 1924, I, pp. 76-77). Zosimos of Panopolis, who about 300 quotes a book of Hermes and sends his reader to Poimandres, came from Upper Egypt and lived in Alexandria (Copenhaver 1992, p. xxxiv): one reader joins the two ends. And at Philae, on the southern frontier, Egypt’s last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved on 24 August 394 (Dijkstra 2005, p. 32).

What was Roman Egypt like when the Hermetica were written?

It was a country of two cultures under Roman rule: by 100 CE Egypt had lived under Greek-speaking rule for four centuries, since Ptolemy took control in 323 BCE, and since 30 BCE it had belonged to Rome (Copenhaver 1992, pp. xvii-xviii). Educated Egyptians wrote Greek and Greek settlers took up Egyptian gods: the Ptolemies’ administration forced some Hellenization, above all in language, on any Egyptian who wished to deal with the new rulers, and foreign residents adapted their beliefs to the Egyptian milieu (pp. xix, xxii). Platonism and Stoicism supplied the era’s intellectual vocabulary (mind, cosmos, matter, fate): Walter Scott (1924, I, p. 9) found the influence of Plato, above all of the Timaeus, on almost every page of the Hermetica, mixed with terms from Stoic physics. The temples kept an older inheritance: ritual knowledge, sacred writing, the figure of Thoth. Even the Hermetica’s teachers bear the names Greeks gave to Egyptian gods: Hermes for Thoth, Asclepius for Imhotep (Copenhaver 1992, pp. xiii, xxii-xxiii).

What was happening to Egypt’s temples?

They were losing their privileges and, in the end, their state funding: from Augustus on, the government curtailed priestly rights and kept strict control over priests and temple lands, and in the course of the third century the emperors apparently reduced and then ended their financial support (Dijkstra 2005, pp. 30, 38). A class of learned men watched their world contract. The last emperor named in a temple cartouche was Decius, in the mid-third century (Copenhaver 1992, p. xxii), and priests figure prominently as private persons in third- and fourth-century documents, a sign, Dijkstra suggests, that they had to earn a living outside the temple (2005, p. 30). The scholar Christian Bull has argued that the Hermetica are best read against exactly this backdrop: priestly teachers, addressing Greek-speaking seekers, translating what could be saved of Egyptian religion into the era’s philosophical idiom (Burns 2025, pp. 110-111). The motive was adaptation, not nostalgia. The end came later, and unevenly: in Alexandria the Serapeum was destroyed in 391 or 392, while at Philae a hieroglyphic inscription was still carved in 394 and a demotic one in 452 (Dijkstra 2005, pp. 31-32).

Does the Asclepius prophecy describe the end of the temples?

It describes Egypt abandoned by its gods, but it was written before the temples were closed: Lactantius, writing between 303 and 311, already cites this part of the Greek Perfect Discourse, the original of the Latin Asclepius (Scott 1924, I, pp. 92-94). Read against the shrinking temple world, the famous “apocalypse” (Egypt abandoned by its gods, the land of temples become a land of tombs) stops being a generic prophecy and becomes something rawer: a lament written while the decline was under way. Bull (2018, p. 447) hears in it the voice of Egyptian priests who felt increasingly dispossessed by the Roman administration (Burns 2025, p. 110).

Were there Hermetic communities?

Probably small ones, not a secret order: Christian Bull (2018) concludes that the Egyptian priests he sees behind the texts organised themselves like Roman voluntary associations (Burns 2025, p. 110). André-Jean Festugière, whose Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste began to appear in 1944, read the initiation scenes as literary mysteries (Lese-Mysterien), not records of practice (Wouter Hanegraaff 2008, pp. 159-160).

Then the Nag Hammadi finds of 1945 yielded a Hermetic ritual text, the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth, and a prayer of thanksgiving attested in three languages: in Coptic in Codex VI, in Latin at the end of the Asclepius (41) and in Greek in the Papyrus Mimaut, a magical papyrus now in the Louvre (Scott 1924, I, p. 77; Burns 2023, p. 287). Jean-Pierre Mahé, working on the new texts from the late 1970s, argued forcefully for organised communities in which such initiations took place (Hanegraaff 2008, pp. 128, 159); Hanegraaff answers that we do not know, and thinks it most plausible that the treatises came from loosely organised circles of educated people in Egypt (pp. 159-160).

Key facts
When	c. 100-300 CE (philosophical Hermetica)
Where	Roman Egypt: Alexandria and the temple towns
Who	Unknown authors writing as Hermes; Egyptian priests, argues Bull (2018)
Intellectual climate	Middle Platonism, Stoicism, Egyptian temple religion
Key modern study	Christian H. Bull, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus (2018)

Fair questions

Who wrote the Hermetica?

No one knows their names. The treatises speak through Hermes Trismegistus and his circle, and Brian Copenhaver (1992) calls their writers persons unknown to us. Christian Bull (2018), developing a suggestion of Garth Fowden (1986), argues that at least a core group were Egyptian priests trained in Greek philosophy; André-Jean Festugière, co-editor of the Greek text (1946-1954), tied them instead to Greek philosophy.

Where were the Hermetica written?

In Roman Egypt, though no single city can be named with certainty. Alexandria, Egypt’s Greek-speaking metropolis, stands behind their Greek and their philosophy, while much of the evidence comes from Upper Egypt: the Coptic copies found near Nag Hammadi in 1945, and Zosimos of Panopolis, who knew Hermetic books about 300 and lived in Alexandria. The Asclepius points to Hermopolis, the city named after Hermes, and the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth to a temple in Diospolis, but neither passage proves where a treatise was written.

When were the Hermetica written?

Mostly between about 100 and 300 CE. The texts carry no dates, so the range rests on their Greek and their Platonist ideas and on later writers who quote them, among them Zosimos of Panopolis about 300 and Lactantius, who quoted them in Greek between 303 and 311. Walter Scott (1924) put most of them in the third century; Christian Bull speaks of the first three centuries CE.

Why does the dating matter?

Because for some 150 years European readers took these texts for revelation older than Plato: the preface to Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation, printed in 1471, placed Hermes about the time of Moses. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon argued from their vocabulary that they were Greek works of the Christian era, from about the end of the first century; Walter Scott (1924) later rejected his idea of a Christian forger, arguing that the authors were pagans. Placing them in Roman Egypt rewrote their meaning: from primordial revelation to late-antique synthesis.

Did the Library of Alexandria hold the Hermetica?

There is no evidence that it did. The ancient evidence ties books of Hermes to temples instead: about 200 CE Clement of Alexandria described forty-two books of Hermes that Egyptian priests held indispensable for their rites, four of them astrological (Copenhaver 1992, p. xxxiii). On that evidence, their world was the temple more than the Museum.

Cite this

The Hermetica were written in Greek in Roman Egypt between about 100 and 300 CE by authors who wrote as Hermes Trismegistus and whose real names are unknown. Christian Bull (2018), developing a suggestion of Garth Fowden (1986), argues that at least a core of them were Egyptian priests, writing while Rome cut back the temples’ privileges and, in the third century, their funding. Alexandria, Egypt’s Greek-speaking metropolis, stands for the Greek side of the texts; much of the evidence points up the Nile, to the Nag Hammadi codices found in Upper Egypt in 1945 and to Zosimos of Panopolis, who knew Hermetic books about 300.

Based on: Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1992); introduction, pp. xiii-xxxv, free sample from the publisher (PDF).

Permanent address: https://thehermeticum.com/path/03-alexandria/#cytuj · last updated 2026-11-02

Sources & further reading

Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1992); introduction, pp. xiii-xxxv, free sample from the publisher (PDF).
Christian H. Bull, The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 186; Leiden: Brill, 2018), doi:10.1163/9789004370845.
Dylan M. Burns, review of Bull 2018, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 19 (2025), pp. 103-112, doi:10.1163/18725473-12341566; open copy at UvA-DARE.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnōsis in the Hermetica”, International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2 (2008), pp. 128-163, doi:10.1163/187254708X335728; open copy at UvA-DARE.
Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Walter Scott, Hermetica, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 9, 29-43, 76-77, 92-94, 359, scan at the Internet Archive.
G. R. S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. III (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906), pp. 273-284, scan at the Internet Archive.
Hugo Lundhaug and Christian H. Bull (eds), The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 134; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023), introduction by Christian H. Bull and Hugo Lundhaug, pp. 1-3, open access.
Dylan M. Burns, “The Nag Hammadi Codices and Graeco-Egyptian Magical and Occult Literature”, in Lundhaug and Bull (eds), The Nag Hammadi Codices as Monastic Books (2023), pp. 279-316, open copy at UvA-DARE.
Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, Religious Encounters on the Southern Egyptian Frontier in Late Antiquity (AD 298-642) (PhD thesis, University of Groningen, 2005), pp. 30-32, 38, 68, University of Groningen repository.
Alan K. Bowman, “Egypt”, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. X, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 676-702, doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521264303.025.
Augustus, Res gestae divi Augusti 27, Latin text at The Latin Library.
Socrates Scholasticus, Church History V.16, tr. A. C. Zenos (1890), at New Advent.
Berliner Papyrussammlung, “Affidavit”, BGU I 16 (P. 6889), 159-160 CE, object of the month.
University of Bergen, notice of Christian H. Bull’s doctoral defence on 27 June 2014, “En egyptisk gud skriver gresk filosofi” (in Norwegian).
Eugene V. Afonasin, review of Corpus Hermeticum, ed. A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière, Coptic texts ed. I. Ramelli (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.11.13, at BMCR.