THOTH — THE IBIS WHO WROTE DOWN THE WORLD
When the Egyptians wanted to say a thing was true, they said it was written.
They did not mean it metaphorically. In Egypt the world was held together by words, and the god who owned the words was a bird with a long curved beak and a patient eye. His name was Djehuty. We know him as Thoth.
THE BIRD WITH THE CRESCENT BEAK
Thoth was shown as a man with the head of an ibis, a wading bird with a long, down-curved beak, or sometimes as a baboon. The bird form is the one that matters. The curve of an ibis’s beak looks very much like the crescent moon, and the Egyptians noticed. Thoth was the god of the moon, and with it the god of everything the moon measures: months, calendars, cycles, time itself.
He was also the god of writing. In the Egyptian view, hieroglyphs were medu netjer, “the words of the god,” and Thoth was the one who had given them. Scribes poured a little water from their ink before they began work, in his honour. He was the patron of anyone who could read, count or measure, which in ancient Egypt made him the patron of nearly everyone with power.
His home was Hermopolis, which the Egyptians called Khemenu, the City of Eight. The Greeks named it for their own Hermes, whom they considered the same god, and it was there that the eight primeval beings of the Ogdoad were worshipped, the frog and serpent figures we met in the story of the Nile.
THE SCRIBE OF THE GODS
Every court needs someone who writes things down, and the court of the gods had Thoth. He was the divine scribe, the keeper of records, the one who knew what had been decided and could say exactly how. When a quarrel between gods had to be settled, he was the one who read the evidence. When a king’s reign was to be counted, Thoth marked the years on the palm leaf.
The great quarrel, the one that went on for eighty years, was between Horus and Seth over who should rule Egypt. In the long, cunning, sometimes comic story of that struggle, Thoth acts as an advisor and a fixer. He is the one who suggests how to settle things, who writes the letters, who finds the way through. And when the fighting ended with Seth tearing out Horus’s eye, it was Thoth who found it and healed it. The restored eye is the Wedjat, the Eye of Horus, and its full story is a story about Thoth’s work as much as Horus’s.
THE FIVE EXTRA DAYS
There is a story about Thoth that explains why Egypt’s calendar has an odd end. Plutarch tells it. Nut, the sky, was forbidden by the sun god to give birth on any day of the year. Thoth, who loved her, went to the Moon and played a game of draughts with her. He won a little of her light from her, and from that light he made five extra days that belonged to no month. On those days Nut gave birth to Osiris, Horus the Elder, Seth, Isis and Nephthys.
The tale is late, and it is a Greek retelling, but it fits what we know of Egyptian practice. Their calendar did have five days at the end of the year, outside the twelve months of thirty days, and those days were treated as a time apart. Whoever measured time in Egypt, Egypt gave the credit to Thoth.
THE ONE WHO WRITES THE VERDICT
The most important thing Thoth did happened after death.
In the Hall of Two Truths, the heart of the dead person is placed on a scale against the feather of Ma’at. Anubis tends the balance. The monster Ammit waits beside it, ready to eat any heart that sinks. And at the end of the scale, with a reed pen and a palette, stands Thoth. He watches the needle. He writes down the result.
That is a large thing to hand to a scribe. Thoth does not judge; he records. But what he records is final, and everything that happens afterward depends on his pen. The whole afterlife of an Egyptian, the Field of Reeds or the jaws of Ammit, is decided by what Thoth writes. We told the scene in Anubis and the weighing of the heart, and it is carried on the tee Lighter Than The Feather. Thoth is the one who closes that story. He is the last word.
A MILLION BIRDS
The Egyptians honoured Thoth by honouring his animal. Across Egypt, at Saqqara and at Tuna el-Gebel near Hermopolis, there are long underground galleries filled with mummified ibises, buried as offerings to the god. Estimates for a single catacomb run to well over a million birds. Whole industries kept the sacred ibis, fed it, killed it and wrapped it for a pilgrim to carry down the stairs and leave in the dark.
It is hard to look at those galleries without feeling what the Egyptians felt: that writing, counting and remembering were not skills but divine acts, and that the creature who stood for them deserved a million graves.
WHAT THE DESIGN CARRIES
The back print is an ibis drawn almost entirely from shadow. Its long beak is a single sweep of white, a crescent, a moon, a blade, curving down the left side of the back. A small orange eye catches the light. Grey-white feathers spike from the head and neck, and across the lower right a broad collar of silver and dark feathers curves like the rim of a bowl. Below it, scattered orange brushstrokes run down the fabric like embers of ink.
Most of the figure is left black, so that it fades into the shirt. That is deliberate. Thoth is the god of what is recorded, and the best-kept records are the ones nobody sees you keeping.
WHAT THOTH ACTUALLY MEANS
Egypt looked at the sun, the river and the desert and decided that the thing holding all of it together was not power. It was record. Someone had to write down the year, measure the flood, count the grain, hear the case, tally the heart. Without that someone, the rest would be noise.
There is a quiet dignity in that. The god of the scribes is not the god of the strong or the beautiful. He is the god of whoever pays attention, whoever remembers accurately, whoever puts it in writing so that it will still be true tomorrow.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
Thoth stands at the centre of the Egypt Mythos collection, at the table where everything is written. Lighter Than The Feather carries the scale he watches, and Names Outlive Time carries the fear his writing answers. Eye of Horus carries the eye he healed, and What the Eye Became carries the Eye he brought home from the south.
The stories are here too: the Second Death, Sekhmet, Wepwawet, Khnum and Meretseger.
— Neolithic Store