Ibis

The African sacred ibis writes Thoth's name. It is the standard hieroglyphic form for the god of writing, reckoning, the moon and the adjudication of disputes, and the choice is not arbitrary: the long curved bill was read as the crescent moon and as the stroke of a reed pen, and the bird's deliberate wading gait reads as method.

Thoth's functions cluster around the same idea. He records the verdict at the weighing of the heart, standing with a palette while the scales are read. He is credited with the invention of writing, with the division of time, and with the words of power that make ritual work. Where an Egyptian text needs someone to have written something down, Thoth wrote it.

The Greeks identified him with Hermes and produced Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-greatest, from an Egyptian epithet, and the entire Hermetic literature descends from that identification. A body of Greek philosophical and magical text that shaped the whole Western esoteric tradition begins with an Egyptian bird god of accountancy.

The bird itself is now extinct in Egypt. It disappeared from the country in the nineteenth century, probably through habitat loss along the Nile, and survives elsewhere in Africa and as an introduced nuisance in southern Europe.

The ibis catacombs are among the strangest things Egypt produced. At Tuna el-Gebel, at Saqqara and at Abydos, galleries cut into the rock hold mummified ibises in ceramic jars, stacked from floor to ceiling, in numbers estimated at roughly four million at Saqqara and something similar at Tuna el-Gebel.

They are votive offerings. A pilgrim to a shrine of Thoth bought a mummified bird and dedicated it, in the way a pilgrim elsewhere would buy a candle, and the industry that supplied them ran for centuries. Radiography shows that quality control was uneven: some bundles hold a complete bird, some hold a few bones and a lot of packing, and some hold nothing but linen and mud.

Where the birds came from was long assumed to be large-scale farming, and ancient texts mention feeding them. DNA work published in 2019 on birds from several sites found genetic diversity consistent with wild populations rather than a closed captive stock, which suggests seasonal capture from the wild, or at most short-term tending, rather than industrial breeding.

The scale is worth sitting with. This is a religious practice that consumed millions of a single wild bird species over centuries, in the country where that species is now extinct, in honour of the god of measurement and record.