{ "id": "thoth", "type": "entity", "name": "Thoth", "summary": "Ibis-headed inventor of writing and numbers, \"clerk of the gods\", recorder of the weighing of the heart and advocate who cleared Osiris and Horus of Set's charges; son of Ra and his deputy in the Tuat. Plutarch and Herodotus call him Hermes — the god who won the five extra days from the moon at draughts.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "egyptian", "deities", "wisdom-gods", "scribes", "moon-gods", "judgment" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "equivalent_of", "target": "hermes" }, { "rel": "child_of", "target": "ra" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "maat" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "osiris" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "horus" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "isis" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "anubis" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "duat" }, { "rel": "attested_in", "target": "on-isis-and-osiris" } ], "questions": [ "Who is Thoth?", "Why is Thoth identified with Hermes?", "What did Thoth invent?", "What is the role of Thoth in the judgment of the dead?", "How did Thoth win the five extra days of the year?", "Why does Thoth have the head of an ibis?", "Who is the father of Thoth?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "Budge opens his book with Thoth: Egyptian writing \"was believed to have been invented by the god Tehuti, or Thoth\"; he \"also invented the science of numbers\", fixed the courses of sun, moon and stars, was \"the clerk of the gods\" who kept the registers of men's deeds, and appears \"as an ibis-headed man\" with a dog-headed ape \"Asten\" as his companion; late tradition counted the \"Books of Thoth\" at 36,525 (Budge Lit. ch. I).", "sources": [ "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians" ], "confidence": 0.92 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "As \"Chief Judge of the dead\" he presided in the ancient legend of the trial in heaven, proving \"that the charges made by Set were untrue\" against Osiris; in the Hall of Judgment he writes \"the result of the weighing of the heart\" on his palette and \"the gods accepted the report of Thoth without question\" (Budge Lit. ch. I); in Chapter 125 it is \"Thoth, the great Recorder of Egypt\" who questions the dead man before he is introduced to Osiris (Budge Lit. ch. IV).", "sources": [ "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Before leaving the earth Ra bade Thoth \"prepare a series of spells and words of power\" against reptiles, appointed him \"to rule\" the Tuat and keep its register — \"Thoth was to be ever after the representative of Ra in the Other World\" (Budge Lit. ch. VII, Destruction of Mankind); on the Metternich Stele he is \"the Prince of Truth in heaven and on earth\" and heals the stung Horus saying \"I am Thoth, the firstborn son, the son of Ra\" (Budge Lit. ch. VII, Wanderings of Isis).", "sources": [ "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians" ], "confidence": 0.92 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Plutarch tells his stories under the name Hermes: \"playing at draughts with the moon, he won from her the seventieth part of each of her periods of illumination, and from all the winnings he composed five days\", the birthdays of the gods (Plut. Is. 12); Hermes pleads Horus's legitimacy before the gods and gives Isis her cow-headed helmet (Plut. Is. 19); he is \"the inventor of grammar and music\", and \"the first of the Muses at Hermopolis\" is called Isis (Plut. Is. 3). Plutarch never writes the name Thoth.", "sources": [ "plutarch-isis-osiris" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The equation Thoth = Hermes rests on place and bird rather than on a sentence: Budge's \"Thoth, the most mighty god, the Lord of Khemenu (Hermopolis)\" (Budge Lit. ch. V) is ibis-headed (ch. I); Herodotus sends dead ibises for burial \"to the city of Hermes\" (Hdt. 2.67.1) and notes a temple of Hermes at Bubastis (Hdt. 2.138.4); Plutarch records a festival of Hermes at which they eat honey and a fig saying \"A sweet thing is Truth\" (Plut. Is. 68).", "sources": [ "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians", "herodotus-histories", "plutarch-isis-osiris" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "\"According to the Hermopolitans\" the Creator himself was Thoth (Budge Lit. ch. VI); in the Book of Breathings he \"writeth the 'Book of Breathings' with his own fingers\" for the dead (Budge Lit. ch. V), and a Leyden hymn calls hieroglyphs \"the letters of Thoth\" (Budge Lit. ch. XII).", "sources": [ "budge-literature-ancient-egyptians" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [ "Plutarch's Hermes is Thoth in every story — the five days, the advocacy for Horus — but the name Thoth never appears in the Greek treatise.", "The Egyptian texts give him three offices at once — scribe, judge and healer-magician — and make him son and deputy of Ra.", "The Hermes equation is inferred from Hermopolis and the ibis, so this corpus rates it 0.85, not 0.95." ], "faqs": [ { "q": "Why is Thoth identified with Hermes?", "claim": "c5" }, { "q": "What did Thoth invent?", "claim": "c1" }, { "q": "What is the role of Thoth in the judgment of the dead?", "claim": "c2" }, { "q": "How did Thoth win the five extra days of the year?", "claim": "c4" }, { "q": "Who is the father of Thoth?", "claim": "c3" } ], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "theoretical", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Pages state \"Thoth, Greek Hermes\" as fact. This object shows that the Greek witnesses only ever say Hermes, traces how the equation is made (Hermopolis, the ibis), and binds each of Thoth's roles to the Egyptian text where Budge found it.", "confidence": 0.89, "last_verified": "2026-09-03", "media": [], "x": { "myth": { "pantheon": "egyptian", "kind": "deity", "group": "other", "domains": [ "writing", "wisdom", "reckoning", "the moon", "magic", "judgment" ], "symbols": [ "ibis", "reed and palette", "dog-headed ape" ], "wikidata": "Q146921" } }, "canonical_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/thoth", "api_url": "https://mythosdata.dev/api/k/thoth.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Thoth", "description": "Ibis-headed inventor of writing and numbers, \"clerk of the gods\", recorder of the weighing of the heart and advocate who cleared Osiris and Horus of Set's charges; son of Ra and his deputy in the Tuat. Plutarch and Herodotus call him Hermes — the god who won the five extra days from the moon at draughts.", "url": "https://mythosdata.dev/k/thoth", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-09-03", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Herodotus, Histories — tr. A. D. Godley (Loeb, 1920), Perseus TEI edition", "url": "https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg0016/tlg001/tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng2.xml" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride) — tr. William Baxter, rev. W. W. Goodwin (1874), Perseus TEI edition", "url": "https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-greekLit/blob/master/data/tlg0007/tlg089/tlg0007.tlg089.perseus-eng3.xml" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "E. A. Wallis Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914), Project Gutenberg #15932 via GITenberg", "url": "https://github.com/GITenberg/The-Literature-of-the-Ancient-Egyptians_15932/blob/master/15932.txt" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Thoth" } }