Attribution case

This document is ascribed to someone who did not write it. Ascribing a work to a revered figure was normal ancient and medieval practice, so this is not automatically forgery — but the attribution is a claim, and claims can be tested.

The claim: That these are the writings of Hermes Trismegistus — Thoth — preserving primordial Egyptian wisdom older than Moses. Marsilio Ficino translated the corpus in 1471 for Cosimo de Medici, who is said to have ordered it set ahead of Plato precisely because it was believed older.

The evidence: The texts are in Koine Greek of the imperial period, not Egyptian, and no Egyptian-language original or demotic antecedent has ever been produced. Their content is saturated with Middle Platonism and Stoicism, with Jewish scriptural echoes — philosophical currents of the Roman era, not of the Old Kingdom. The vocabulary itself dates them.

What settled it: Isaac Casaubon, 1614, in De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI. He dated the corpus to the Christian era on philological grounds — reading the language rather than the tradition. It is one of the founding demonstrations of textual criticism as a method, and it collapsed the Renaissance Hermetic project.

Still open: Whether genuinely Egyptian religious material is embedded in the Greek is still argued, and not unreasonably. The Nag Hammadi discovery (1945) included Hermetic texts in Coptic — the Asclepius and the Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth — proving the tradition circulated in the Egyptian language, though still in late antiquity. Late Greek composition and real Egyptian roots are not mutually exclusive. What is settled is the date. What is open is the ancestry.