The sacred ibis and Thoth, Egyptian god of writing and the moon

With its long curved beak, the sacred ibis seemed to the Egyptians the natural instrument of a scribe, like the reed pen that traces signs on papyrus. For this reason the bird became the image of Thoth, god of writing, of reckoning and of the moon, counsellor of the gods and recorder of the judgement of the dead. Few Egyptian deities enjoyed such a long afterlife, which reached as far as the speculations of the Hermetic philosophers of the Renaissance.

The scribe god

Thoth, in Egyptian Djehuty, was depicted as a man with the head of an ibis or as a baboon, the other animal sacred to him. He was credited with the invention of hieroglyphs, called the «words of the god», and with the measurement of time through the phases of the moon. In the vignettes of the Book of the Dead he attends the weighing of the heart of the deceased and records the result on a tablet, before Osiris pronounces his verdict.

The main centre of the cult was Khemenu, the city the Greeks called Hermopolis Magna, in Middle Egypt, near today's el-Ashmunein. Here a local theology placed at the origin of the world the Ogdoad, eight primordial deities, and gave Thoth a central role in creation. Of the great sanctuary there remain today above all two colossal quartzite statues of baboons, erected under Amenhotep III.

Ibis mummies at Tuna el-Gebel

The necropolis of Hermopolis, at Tuna el-Gebel, houses vast underground galleries with an enormous number of mummified ibises and baboons, offered as votive gifts mainly between the Late Period and the Ptolemaic age. Other ibis catacombs are found at Saqqara. Recent research on the DNA of the mummies suggests that many birds were caught in the wild and kept for a short time near the temples, rather than bred in large facilities.

In the same necropolis lies the tomb of Petosiris, high priest of Thoth who lived around the end of the fourth century BC, decorated with reliefs in which the Egyptian style blends with Greek elements. Herodotus, in the second book of his Histories, reports that anyone who killed an ibis, even unintentionally, was punished with death, a sign of the respect reserved for this bird.

From Thoth to Hermes Trismegistus

The Greeks identified Thoth with Hermes, the messenger of the gods, who was also linked to speech and interpretation. From this fusion arose the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, «thrice greatest», to whom were attributed the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, composed in Greek in the first centuries of the Christian era. In 1463 Marsilio Ficino completed their Latin translation for Cosimo de' Medici, launching the Renaissance fortune of Hermeticism.

Plato, in the Phaedrus, had already told the myth of Theuth, the Egyptian god who invented letters and presents writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory. The king replies that it will rather produce forgetfulness, because people will rely on external signs instead of remembering. The ibis god thus entered the heart of Greek philosophy as a symbol of the powers and limits of writing.

Paradoxically, the sacred ibis no longer breeds in Egypt today, while it survives in sub-Saharan Africa and in colonies introduced elsewhere. Its images, however, remain everywhere in museums: statuettes of bronze and gilded wood, coffins in the shape of the bird, papyri in which the ibis-headed god calmly records the destiny of the souls of the dead.