The Contendings of Thoth and Baba

At a Glance

• Central figures: Thoth, god of wisdom, writing, and mediation; and Baba (also Babi), a deity of violence, aggression, and untamed force.
• Setting: The divine realm and the underworld, in the mythological framework of Egyptian cosmology where ma’at - cosmic order - governs both gods and mortals.
• The turn: Baba challenges the rule of Ra and the balance of ma’at, forcing Thoth to intervene - not with strength, but with a succession of intellectual tests and riddles that Baba cannot answer.
• The outcome: Thoth defeats Baba through wit and mastery of divine law; Baba, frustrated and subdued, is returned to his place in the underworld.
• The legacy: The contest established that wisdom and the careful application of law hold authority over raw force within the cosmic order - a principle Thoth embodies as scribe and mediator of the gods.

Baba challenged the gods, and the gods sent Thoth.

It was not an obvious choice. Baba - sometimes depicted as a ferocious baboon, sometimes as something worse - was not the kind of force that responded to gentle persuasion. He dwelled in the underworld, where he devoured the souls of those found unworthy, where his hunger for flesh and blood was not metaphor but function. He was not evil in the way chaos is evil; he was simply untamed, the part of existence that precedes law, that has no interest in balance or negotiation. When Baba turned his attention toward the order Ra had established and began pressing against it, the question was not whether someone would answer. The question was what kind of answer would hold.

Thoth understood the problem clearly. Physical force applied to Baba would be force meeting force - and Baba, at force, had no equal among the gods who cared about such things. But Baba’s power was narrow. It moved in straight lines. Thoth’s did not.

Baba in the Underworld

Baba’s domain was the Duat, the underworld, where he served as something between guardian and threat. His role in the judgment of souls was not the measured weighing that Anubis oversaw, not the careful reading of a life against the feather of ma’at that Thoth himself recorded. Baba’s function was cruder: he waited for the unworthy, and he consumed them. The violence was the point. It had to be permanent, irreversible, the kind of ending that left nothing to return.

Among the gods, Baba was tolerated the way necessary things are tolerated. He controlled something real - the untamed hunger that exists at the edge of every ordered system, the force that reminds the living what awaits failure. But when he moved beyond the Duat, when his aggression turned outward toward the structures Ra had built and the balance Thoth maintained, he became something the divine realm could not simply absorb. He was pushing toward chaos. He believed force was sufficient. That force alone was the true measure of power, that wisdom was an ornament worn by those who could not fight.

Thoth at the Weighing of Words

Thoth came not as a warrior. He came as he always came - carrying knowledge of the divine laws, fluent in the language the universe had been built from, patient in the way that only a god who has been scribe to eternity can be patient.

He was the inventor of writing. He was the keeper of sacred knowledge, the one who recorded the verdicts at the weighing of hearts and ensured that the outcome matched the evidence. When the gods disputed, Thoth spoke last and was heard. His authority was not the authority of the raised fist. It was the authority of the one who knows exactly what the law says and can prove it.

He engaged Baba not in combat but in contest - a succession of riddles, moral dilemmas, tests of understanding that moved through the complexities of the cosmos. Baba had strength and ferocity. What he lacked was any framework for thinking about the universe as a system, as something governed by principles rather than by whoever hit hardest. Thoth knew the framework completely. He had written parts of it down.

The Riddles Baba Could Not Solve

The tests Thoth set were precise in their difficulty. They were not obscure for obscurity’s sake - they mapped the actual structure of ma’at, the interlocking obligations and balances that kept the Two Lands and the divine realm from collapsing into isfet, disorder. To answer them correctly required understanding why order existed, not just that it did.

Baba could not answer. Each puzzle turned on a relationship between competing claims - between justice and mercy, between the rights of the living and the needs of the dead, between the authority of the strong and the protection owed to the weak. Baba saw force as the resolution to each of these. Force was not the answer Thoth was looking for.

Baba grew frustrated. Frustration did not help him. Thoth waited, asked the next question, and waited again. The gap between what Baba knew and what the contest required did not narrow. It widened.

The Submission

At the end of it, Baba had no ground left to stand on. He had been outmaneuvered at every turn by a god who had not raised a hand against him - who had simply demonstrated, step by careful step, that the universe Baba wanted to overturn was not held together by force and could not be dismantled by it.

Baba submitted. He was returned to the Duat, to his place among the waiting dark, where he remained what he had always been - fierce, necessary in his way, the consuming consequence at the far end of judgment. But contained. Within the order he had tried to break.

Ra’s rule stood. The scales stayed level. Thoth recorded the outcome, as he recorded everything, in the precise strokes of a script that the violent and the untamed could not read.