Theuth, Thamus, and the Invention of Writing: Reconstructing the African Context
By: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Introduction: Plato’s Phaedrus and the Problem of Memory
In one of the most celebrated passages of Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts an ancient Egyptian tale in which Theuth (Thoth), the god of wisdom and inventor of writing, presents his discovery to King Thamus, ruler of Thebes. Theuth argues that his invention will improve wisdom and strengthen memory, offering a gift to humanity that will immortalise words beyond the fragility of speech. King Thamus, however, responds with scepticism. He warns that writing will, paradoxically, lead not to memory’s preservation but to its diminishment:
“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves”
(Plato, Phaedrus275a).
This myth has echoed across centuries as a parable about technology’s double edge. It is cited as one of the earliest reflections on what modern philosophers call “the externalisation of knowledge,” where tools designed to aid thought reshape the very nature of thinking.
Yet the story also presents a puzzle: did Socrates invent this tale as a rhetorical flourish, or was he gesturing toward a real ancient Egyptian context, imperfectly remembered through Greek mediation?
Phaedrus, Plato’s interlocutor, himself teases Socrates, remarking that he is always “making up stories of Egypt or any country you please.” This scepticism leaves open the possibility that Socrates, drawing on partial knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture, substituted names and distorted roles.
In particular, the figure of King Thamus raises questions. No pharaoh by that name is attested in ancient Egyptian records, and ancient Egyptians themselves did not call their rulers “kings” but “nesu-bit” (He of the Sedge and Bee) or “Pharaoh” (Great House). It is plausible that “Thamus” reflects not invention but mistranslation—a Greek attempt to render an Egyptian title or association into familiar terms.
This article argues that Socrates’ myth is not a fabrication but a distorted echo of real Egyptian ancient history. By reconstructing the cultural context of Theuth (Thoth) and tracing the emergence of writing in Kemet, we may locate the roots of this narrative in the lived experience of pharaohic Egypt.
In doing so, we situate Plato’s story not as mythological ornament but as a genuine, though imperfect, transmission of African epistemological debates about orality, writing, and memory.
Thoth, Theuth, And the Divine Invention of Writing
Thoth, known in ancient Egyptian as Djehuty, was among the most significant deities of Kemet. Associated with wisdom, language, mathematics, astronomy, and scribal knowledge, Thoth occupied a liminal space between the divine and human. He was often depicted as ibis-headed or as a baboon, both animals connected to intellectual faculties.
In ancient Egyptian cosmology, Thoth’s role was not merely to invent writing but to maintain cosmic order (Ma’at) by inscribing the decrees of the gods. His invention of hieroglyphs was understood not as a human discovery but as a divine gift, a sacred transmission of order into visible form.
In this sense, writing was never neutral in ancient Egypt: it was bound up with the sacred, with ritual, with permanence.
When ancient Greek authors such as Plato translated Thoth into Theuth, they were adapting a cultural figure of immense gravity. To speak of Theuth “inventing” writing was not to describe a secular act of utility but to recall a mythic foundation in which writing was a tool of divine governance.
Socrates’ use of this figure, therefore, suggests that he drew on real ancient Egyptian traditions circulating in Hellenistic intellectual culture.
King Thamus And the Problem of Identification
The greater enigma lies in King Thamus. No ancient Egyptian king bears this name in extant records, leading some commentators to dismiss the story as a Greek fabrication. Yet when viewed through the lens of cross-cultural translation, “Thamus” may represent a distorted rendering of Amun, the great god of Thebes, or a conflation of Theban pharaohs associated with Amun.
During the Middle and New Kingdoms, the cult of Amun rose to unprecedented prominence. Pharaohs were styled “sons of Amun,” and Thebes became the spiritual and political capital of ancient Egypt. To a Greek ear, the foreign name Amūn could have been transliterated poorly into “Thamus,” especially if filtered through oral transmission. Indeed, ancient Greek authors frequently Hellenised ancient Egyptian names—rendering Djehuty as Theuth, Imn as Ammon, and Wsr as Osiris.
If this identification holds, then “King Thamus” represents not a specific monarch but the pharaohic authority tied to the cult of Amun. Candidates for historical grounding include:
- Mentuhotep II (c. 2040–1991 BCE), who reunited ancient Egypt and elevated Thebes as the royal capital.
- Ahmose I (c. 1550–1525 BCE), founder of the New Kingdom, who linked his rule to Amun’s favour.
- Thutmose III (c. 1479–1425 BCE), often called “the Napoleon of ancient Egypt,” whose reign epitomised Theban dominance.
In all these cases, the king was inseparable from Amun’s cult. To Socrates’ audience, collapsing “pharaoh of Thebes” into “King Thamus” would have been a simplification, not a fabrication.
The Emergence Of Writing in Kemet
Archaeological evidence places the origin of ancient Egyptian writing around 3100 BCE, during the reign of Narmer, the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt. The earliest inscriptions, found on ivory tags and pottery shards, were administrative, recording ownership and taxation. By the late Second Dynasty (c. 2700 BCE), writing had developed into full sentences, as seen in tomb inscriptions.
Three main scripts coexisted:
- Hieroglyphic, used for monumental and sacred inscriptions.
- Hieratic, a cursive form for religious and administrative use.
- Demotic, a later simplification for daily transactions.
Despite this, literacy remained restricted to scribes, priests, and elites. Oral tradition continued to dominate daily life, storytelling, ritual, and political negotiation. Writing served primarily as a supplement to oral authority, a means of fixing what was already known by memory.
This aligns with the warning of Thamus in Phaedrus. Ancient Egyptians themselves viewed writing as powerful but limited—capable of fixing words but incapable of carrying the full weight of wisdom. True knowledge, they held, was preserved in heka (sacred speech) and oral recitation, not in inert inscriptions.
Orality, Memory, and the Ancient African Epistemological Tradition
The primacy of oral tradition is not unique to Kemet but characteristic of ancient African knowledge systems broadly. Oral storytelling, proverbs, and ritualised performance remain central modes of transmitting wisdom across the continent. The reliance on memory cultivated skills of extraordinary verbal dexterity, rhythm, and metaphorical thought.
To introduce writing into such a culture was to shift the grounds of knowledge. What had been embodied, living, and communal became fixed, external, and solitary. In this sense, the anxiety dramatised in Phaedrus reflects a real cultural fault line: the movement from oral memory to written archive.
Seen through this lens, Socrates’ myth is not a Greek invention but a record—however distorted—of an African intellectual debate. Ancient Egyptians, more than Greeks, would have recognised the double edge of writing: a divine gift, yet a potential source of forgetfulness if it supplanted the living practice of memory.
Philosophical Implications: Was Socrates Wrongly Dismissed?
Modern commentators sometimes dismiss Socrates’ story as a fable. Yet when anchored in ancient Egyptian history, his narrative takes on new weight. Socrates’ point—that writing diminishes memory—has been borne out by modern cognitive science, which shows that external storage reduces internal recall. But more importantly, his myth echoes a genuine cultural concern in Kemet: that writing, if misused, could erode the communal practice of wisdom.
The historical distortions—“Thamus” for Amun’s pharaohs, “Theuth” for Thoth—should not obscure the truth beneath the allegory. Socrates was not making up a story at random. He was relaying, in ancient Greek philosophical form, an African wisdom tradition that had grappled with the meaning of writing for centuries.
The irony of Socrates’ retelling is profound. In misnaming the pharaoh as “Thamus,” and in presenting Theuth as a simplified caricature of the god Thoth, Socrates himself enacted the very fallibility of memory that his dialogue sought to critique. His recollection of an African wisdom tale came filtered through the distortions of oral transmission, cultural translation, and selective memory. In this sense, Socrates demonstrated that memory—while essential—is never a neutral vessel of truth. It bends, compresses, and reshapes reality into a form that is accessible to the storyteller and his audience. Thus, the allegory of Thamus and Theuth becomes self-referential: the lesson on the limitations of writing is simultaneously a demonstration of the limitations of memory.
This tension between memory and inscription reveals the universality of the dilemma. On one hand, oral tradition preserves meaning through performance, repetition, and collective participation. On the other, writing secures permanence but at the cost of disembedding knowledge from its living context. Socrates’ distortion shows how even oral wisdom—reliant on memory and speech—cannot fully escape the erosion of time. In forgetting the precise historical details of Kemet’s rulers and deities, he inadvertently illustrated that memory alone cannot safeguard truth against alteration. Thoth’s original caution, therefore, is vindicated in the very structure of Plato’s dialogue.
At the same time, Socrates’ error does not simply expose the weaknesses of memory; it underscores its humanity. The tendency to misremember or misname is part of what makes oral traditions vibrant and adaptable. A misremembered name does not necessarily erase the wisdom of the teaching—it transforms it into a myth that can travel across cultures, embedding African thought within the philosophical fabric of Greece. In this way, distortion becomes transmission. Socrates may have failed to name the correct Pharaoh, but he succeeded in preserving the essence of an ancient African debate on the role of writing in shaping human cognition.
From an Egyptological perspective, this suggests that what survives in Plato’s Phaedrus is less a myth “invented” by the Greeks than a cultural memory refracted through their own categories of kingship and divinity. By calling the Pharaoh a “king,” the Greeks mistranslated the Egyptian conception of rulership, which was bound to divinity and not reducible to monarchy in the European sense. But this mistranslation, too, is illustrative: it shows that the act of remembering across cultural frontiers is inevitably selective and transformative. In this way, Socrates embodied the very critique he voiced—he proved that human memory is prone to forgetfulness and distortion, and yet, paradoxically, that writing is capable of carrying wisdom forward with perfection.
From Ancient Egypt to Modern Times: The Long Shadow of Writing
The tension Socrates highlights remains with us today. Just as ancient Egyptians questioned whether writing could replace memory, so modern societies question whether digital tools, artificial intelligence, and global networks weaken or strengthen human cognition. Each technological shift externalises knowledge, changing not only how we remember but what we value as wisdom.
In this light, the myth of Theuth and Thamus is not merely an ancient curiosity. It is a universal parable about the costs of technology. By grounding it in ancient Egyptian history, we restore to Africa its rightful place at the origin of humanity’s deepest reflections on knowledge, memory, and expression.
Reclaiming the African Voice In Plato’s Myth
The myth of Theuth and Thamus, far from being a fanciful Greek invention, is best understood as a refracted memory of ancient Egyptian intellectual traditions. Thoth was indeed revered as the inventor of writing, and Theban kings linked their rule to Amun. Socrates’ imperfect rendering of these figures reflects the limitations of cultural translation, not fabrication.
By identifying “Thamus” with the pharaohic cult of Amun and situating the invention of writing in the First Dynasty (c. 3100 BCE), we see that the dialogue in Phaedrus encodes a real historical moment: the shift from oral to written culture in Kemet.
Socrates’ myth, therefore, is not myth at all, but allegorical history—a preservation of black Africa’s earliest reflections on the promise and peril of the written word.
Expanded References
- Plato. Phaedrus. 274c–275a.
- Assmann, Jan. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Baines, John. “Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society.” Man 18 (1983): 572–599.
- Houston, Stephen. The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Parkinson, Richard. Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment. University of California Press, 1999.
- Vernus, Pascal. Writing in Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge, 2011.
- Conversational Leadership. “The Myth of Thamus and Theuth.” https://conversational-leadership.net/myth-of-thamus-and-theuth/
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