BOOK III. OF DEIFIED PATRIARCHS. HEAD II. OF THOTH, THEUTH AND TAAUTUS.

×It were premature, in the present stage of the inquiry, to do more than indicate, with such brevity as the subject admits, the manner in which the name of Thoth is to be treated, and the conclusion to which the testimonies appear, as at present collected, to lead; and it will be convenient to state the conclusion at once, that the reader may judge, in the course of the exposition, how far it is borne out. It is, that the names which stand in the several writers as Theuth, Theyt, Thoyth and Taautus are one name; that the person who bears it was a man, and of the line of Ham, being, according to the Phenician account, the son of Misor, who is Mizraim; and that he is to be reckoned, accordingly, among the patriarchs who were deified, and not, as Mr. Bryant has supposed, among the titles of a god.¹ That the equation of the several names is one which I make myself, and which no ancient witness makes for me, I do not wish to conceal; the Greek writers who are commonly cited for the identity, Diodorus and Plutarch, say Hermes and not Thoth, and the name is Plato's, Cicero's and Philo's, and not theirs; the examination of the Greek name, and of the office which Diodorus assigns to it, is reserved for the head which follows. The objections which may be urged against the whole, and which I do not affect to underrate, will be considered when the testimonies have been set down. NB-12-017 NB-13-006

×The testimony of Plato is the first in the order of exposition, and is to be distinguished with some care from the use which has been made of it. He relates, in the Phaedrus (Plat. Phaedr. p. 274, 275), that he had heard that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and that the name of the god himself was Theuth; and that it was he who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, and draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.² That part of the relation which respects the god and his inventions I take to be Egyptian tradition, and to be entitled to a corresponding weight; the conversation with the king Thamus which follows, and in which the invention of letters is discussed as an elixir of memory and of reminding, is the philosopher's own, composed for the purpose of the dialogue, and is to be set aside as literary fable, upon the principle which I have already laid down with respect to the compositions of the poets and of writers of that class.³ NB-12-017

×Cicero has the name in a different form, and in a place which it is necessary to give exactly: the Egyptians, he says, hold that one gave to them laws and letters, "Aegyptiis leges et litteras tradidisse: hunc Aegyptii Theyt appellant eodemque nomine anni primus mensis apud eos vocatur" (that is, "to have given the Egyptians laws and letters: him the Egyptians call Theyt, and the first month of the year bears the same name among them").⁴ It is to be observed that the fragment begins in the middle of a list, and is said of one of the persons whom the speaker enumerates under a Greek name; that the month which bears the name is the first of the Egyptian year; and that a name so used in the calendar is Egyptian in its own country, and is not a Greek rendering. Whether the giver of laws and letters was a man or a title the passage does not say, and I do not suppose it. NB-19-030

×The third witness is Philo Byblius, who is to be heard in the fragment of Sanchoniatho which Eusebius has preserved, and who gives the name as Taautus, and gives him a father: from Misor, he says, was born Taautus, who invented the first written alphabet; the Egyptians called him Thoyth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks Hermes (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10).⁵ It is here that the Greek name is joined, by a Phenician writer, to the Egyptian and to the Alexandrian, and it is here that the genealogy is found upon which the argument of the present head depends. The same writer relates, in the same place, that when Kronos came into the south country he gave all Egypt to the god Tauthus, that it might be his dwelling-place; and that what was recorded was recorded first by the seven sons of Suduc, the Cabeiri, and by their eighth brother Asclepius, at the command of Tauthus.⁶ Tauthus is here a person to whom a country is assigned, and who gives orders to others; the record is by him authorised, and not made by him. The Cabeiri appear in Egypt in this place, as the sons of Suduc; their number, seven with an eighth, is to be ascertained before anything is built upon it, and whether they are the same as the Cabeiri of other accounts I leave open, and shall leave open until the heads that are appointed for them. NB-13-006 NB-11-016

×Mr. Bryant has resolved the several names into one: "Theuth, Thoth, Taut, Taautes, are the same title diversified; and belong to the chief god of Egypt. Eusebius speaks of him as the same as Hermes."⁷ In the article upon Mizraim, moreover, he allows that the head of the family of the Egyptians "is imagined to have been in the singular Misor, or Metzor," and connects the name with the Misor of Philo Byblius.⁸ But if Misor be Mizraim, then Taautus, his son, is a man, and of the line of Ham; he is not a title, nor the chief god, but a patriarch deified. Mr. Bryant has the premises and declines the conclusion; and the only means by which he can decline it is to suppose beforehand that Taautus is a title, which is the thing that the argument was to prove, and which the genealogy of Philo, whom he has himself cited, is incompatible with. NB-12-017

×In another place the same writer sets Cadmus with Hermes, Thoth and Osiris, and says: "In short, Cadmus was the same as Hermes, Thoth, and Osiris: under which characters more than one person is alluded to."⁹ He makes him, further, principally Ham, whom his posterity looked up to as the Sun. Two things are here joined which do not, as I conceive, agree with one another; for if several persons are meant, to find the four names the same is to identify none of them, and if Ham is principally meant, it is to be asked in which of the names he is principal, and by what means the same person can be at once Ham and the several persons whom the four names are said to cover. I do not yet know what the ancient witnesses say of Hermes and of Thoth separately; they are to be collected apart, before the names are suffered to stand together. NB-09-032

×It is necessary to notice, in the last place, the opinion of Huet, who has reckoned the Taautus of the Phenicians among those who are Moses, and has made the heathen theology in general to flow from Moses and from his acts or writings.¹⁰ The conjecture, to stand, requires one of two things: that the genealogy be set aside, or that Misor be a name of an ancestor of Moses. The testimony offers neither; and I take Misor to be Mizraim, which would place Taautus in the family of Ham and not in the family of Moses. Of the same author's chapter upon Vulcan I enter only what he says: that Amun, Phtha, Vulcan and Osiris are one, which he rests upon the authority of two writers, and that, "we have already established that Osiris is Moses," whence it follows, for him, that Vulcan is Moses.¹¹ The step that Osiris is Moses he takes there as settled, and I have not weighed it; until I have, I enter nothing from his chapter as shewn. His explanation of the sonship of the Nile, which belongs to the same chapter, is a separate point, and rests on a separate witness. NB-13-006 NB-11-033

×The view which I propose, as it is at present sketched, is therefore that Theuth, Theyt and Taautus are one name, differently written by Plato, by Cicero and by Philo; that the person who bore it, to whom the Egyptians ascribed the invention of numbers and of letters, was Taautus the son of Misor; that Misor is Mizraim; and that the inventor of letters was accordingly a man of the line of Ham, deified by his posterity, and placed by the Egyptians among their gods. The proof of the identity of the Greek Hermes with this person, which no witness of the Greeks has made, is reserved for the next head. It may be objected that the name Mizraim is held by many learned men to be properly a plural, and to signify a people and not a person; to which I answer that Mr. Bryant, who reports the opinion, says in the same place that the head of the family is imagined to have been in the singular, and that I follow him so far, without rejecting the opinion which he reports. It may be objected, in the second place, that Plato, being a philosopher, may have taken the name from the Greeks; to which I answer that Cicero's month shews the name to have been in use in Egypt, and that I do not rest the identity upon Plato alone. It may be objected, lastly, that the conjecture of Huet, which makes the Phenician Taautus Moses, is entitled to a preference on the ground of its simplicity; to which I answer that a conjecture which requires the genealogy to be set aside is not simple but only convenient, and that the remaining objections, of which the principal concerns the office which the Greeks give to Hermes, will be considered under the next head.¹² NB-12-017 NB-13-006 NB-09-032 NB-19-030