The Man
He is supposed to be one of the earliest kings of Egypt; he also supposedly conquered the entire world, says the story, "all the way to Okeanos [Oceanus]." Most English translations of his name, starting sometime in the 20th century onwards, seem to favour spelling it with a transliteration closer to Θοῦλις than "Thulis" is; so it is much easier to find information on him (in English)—i.e., going beyond Kersey Graves—if one were to look up Thoulis.
His story comes from a work penned in the 500s AD, entitled the Khronographia, "Chronicle," by a writer from Antioch named John Malalas (c. 491 – 578). Thoulis's story is part of John's history of the world, which follows the narrative supplied by the Book of Genesis in the Bible, filling in details along the way, but after the Flood it goes into the first kings of some of the world's most famous empires. When Thoulis shows up on the scene near the beginning of Khronographia Book 2, if my count is correct, seven (or at least six) kings have reigned over Egypt. Thoulis is thus the eighth (or seventh).
According to Section 3 of Book 2:
After the death of Helios son of Hephaistos [Hephaestus], Sosis ruled
over the Egyptians. After him reigned Osiris; Horos [Horus] reigned
after Osiris, and Thoulis ruled after Horos. Using a large force, this
last one conquered the whole earth, as far as Okeanos.
And as he was returning, he came to the land of Aphrika [Africa] and
arrogantly approached an oracle. Having made a sacrifice, he beseeched
the oracle in these words: “Tell me, Pyristhenes [Mighty with Fire],
Apseudes [Un-false {i.e. Truthful} One], Makar [Blessed One], you who
bend the aetherial course: Who, prior to my reign, had the power to
subject all to him? And who shall have the power to do so after me?”
The oracle responded: “First: God, and then the Word, and with them
the Spirit. All things were generated together, and they go toward the
One, whose power is aeonian. Make haste to depart from here, mortal,
and complete your worthless life.” And as soon as he left the oracle
he fell victim to a plot by his companions and was slain in Aphrika.
Manetho prepared a record of these ancient and primaeval kingdoms of
the Egyptians.
The Place
Thoulē (Θούλη), Latinised as Thūlē, is an island which, from as early as the 300s BC, Greek and Roman writers described as being at the extreme edge of the world as far as they knew it, somewhere in northern Europe. Regarding it, Wikipedia says:
In classical and medieval literature, ultima Thule (Latin
"farthermost Thule") acquired a metaphorical meaning of any distant
place located beyond the "borders of the known world".
By the Late Middle Ages and early modern period, the Greco-Roman Thule
was often identified with the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes
Ultima Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule was used for Iceland. By the late 19th century, however, Thule was frequently
identified with Norway.
In the footnotes to his translation of the Khronographia, Jason Colavito says that:
The Suda (s.v. Thoulis) gives the same story but adds that the
oracle belonged to Serapis and that the island of Thule was named for
him.
Presumably Thoulis gives his name to this remotest of locations in order to mark the extent of his dominion, although this etymology for the island seems to be unique to the Souda [Suda], an encyclopaedia compiled some four centuries after Malalas' time. Most ancient and mediaeval writers who mention Thoule, if they discuss the origin of its name, do not seem to know about or be bothered with Thoulis.
The Source
Benjamin Garstad, in his article "The account of Thoulis, king of Egypt, in the Chronographia of John Malalas" (in Vol. 107, Issue 1 of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift [2014]), tells us (in the Abstract, on p. 51) that:
Thoulis first appears in the sixth-century chronicle of John Malalas.
It has been suggested that his name is a corruption of the material
found in the traditional Egyptian king-lists, but it seems more likely
that he and the narrative associated with him are a fiction of more
recent invention. Thoulis is modeled on Sesostris, Osiris, and
Alexander the Great and the narrative of his exploits alludes to the
stories of these figures. The focus of this narrative is an oracle
which deflates the king’s arrogance and obliquely prophesies the
doctrine of the Trinity. This oracle is consistent with the
exploitation of ostensibly genuine oracles in the pagan-Christian
polemics of the fourth century. Indeed, the account of Thoulis as a
whole seems to have been drafted to advance the Christian position in
this debate, apparently by one Bouttios in the late fourth century.
[Emphasis mine]
He goes on to say (on pp. 51-52) that:
In spite of the grandiose claims made for him, that he was king of
Egypt and conqueror of the world, he first appears in the sixth
century chronicle of John Malalas and thereafter in works ultimately
dependent on Malalas.
[Emphasis mine]
Garstad then footnotes these works as:
- the "Chronicon Paschale (ed. L. Dindorf. Bonn 1832, I 83-84)"
- the aforementioned Souda entry
- H. Erbse, Fragmente griechischer Theosophien/ Theosophorum Graecorum
Fragmenta (& Syriac translations of parts of this)
- George Cedrenus, Compendium Historiarum
- Fragmenta Historicum Graecorum, associated with John of
Antioch
The article continues (p. 52), saying that Thoulis
seems to be the central figure of a fiction which made a late entry into
the legendary material on Egypt, and to have been given such eminence
chiefly in order to make him an apt recipient for a humiliating oracle
abasing the mightiest of human rulers and extolling the Trinity...
Specifically Thoulis appears to have been invented by one of Malalas'
sources, Bouttios, in the later fourth century, but accepted and
presented as perfectly historical by Malalas himself some two
centuries later.
Based on the names which appear in the traditional ancient list of Egypt's kings, Jason Colavito thinks that Thoulis is "A corruption of Typhonis, or Typhon, the Greek name for Set." For a few different reasons, including some previously quoted here, Garstad would disagree with that position, saying that Thoulis was probably invented out of whole cloth, with a name that would sound and look Egyptian to speakers and readers of Greek. In support of this argument he gives an example from Plato, who in his Phaedrus, has Socrates talk about a pair of Egyptian gods called Theuth and Thamus, who are a spontaneous invention of Plato for the occasion (unless "Theuth" is supposed to = Thoth). The initial letter theta (Θ) in the characters' names, just as in "Thoulis," is here supposed to be "somehow characteristic of Egyptian nomenclature."
In his article (p. 57), says Garstad:
The name of Thoulis might even have been suggested by Manetho's
king-lists. There are at least a couple of royal names which sound
similar: Athothis, the second king of the first dynasty, and Thouoris,
the fifth or sixth king of the nineteenth dynasty.
By the end of his argument (pp. 74-75), however, Garstad is convinced that:
Thoulis... did not come into being as the result of the
corruption of the names in the Egyptian king-list. He was invented as
an addition to the number of famous world conquerors of antiquity. He
was modeled on some of the most prominent of those conquerors,
Sesostris, Osiris, and Alexander, given their traits and made to
undergo their experiences, because he was supposed to recall their
stories and embody the prideful conqueror who vies with God. The
success of Thoulis is noted not for its own sake, but to demonstrate the
real value of even the greatest human achievement. The significance of
the story of Thoulis lies in the humiliation of his conceit and the
insistence upon the pathetic mortality of the whole line of kings
whose pretensions to divinity were still respected in some circles.
The unmistakably Christian terms of the oracle Thoulis receives reveal
the tendency of the author and suggest his intent. Thoulis is a straw
man representing pagan kings and pagan gods in the great argument
between paganism and Christianity which marked the fourth
century.
Describing the Khronographia, Jason Colavito says that its author
John rejects the existence of ancient kingdoms before Noah's Flood and
therefore has relocated stories of primeval Egypt to the period after
the Flood, reorganizing Manetho's list of kings to place the first
post-diluvian monarchs before those originally ascribed to the time of
the gods. John also follows an older Christian tradition of
rationalizing pagan mythology as the deeds of human kings.
Osiris and Thoulis
Neither in the Khronographia nor in any of the mediaeval works which come after it are Thoulis and Osiris the same entity or even identified with each other. As shown above, Thoulis succeeds Horos on the throne, who in turn had succeeded Osiris. Traditionally we know that Horos is the son of Osiris. John makes no mention of the relationship between Thoulis and his predecessors but from the flow of the narrative it looks as though we are to understand him as having begun a new dynasty, perhaps even violently ending Horos's reign.
There are some parallels, however, between John's account of Thoulis on the one hand, and the story of Osiris as narrated by a more ancient Greek author, namely Diodorus Siculus, who has Osiris conquer the world with a huge army. As Garstad's article (pp. 61-62) tells us:
[B]oth Osiris and Thoulis are treacherously slain by close associates
on their return from campaign... Osiris was killed and dismembered by
his brother Typhon. It is this detail in the story of Thoulis, that an
Egyptian king was plotted against and killed by relatives or
companions (ὑπὸ τῶν ἰδίων) which most clearly recalls the famous story
of Osiris. In this connection, it is not hard to find some
significance in the precise term used of the killing of Thoulis. The
word, ἐσϕάγη, from σϕάζω, may mean simply that he was slain, but it
can also refer to slaughtering or killing as a sacrifice. The
implications of butchery and ritual inherent in the term, especially
in the context of an Egyptian ruler treacherously slain by his
relations, would almost unavoidably recall the murder of Osiris. Its
affinities with the story of Osiris, especially the historicized
account found in Diodorus, no doubt offered a certain verisimilitude
to the novel fiction of the account of Thoulis; it sounded like the
typical tale of an Egyptian king of the distant past.
Kersey Graves' supplementary "Zulis" spelling of this character's name is bewildering, and seems, at least to me, to be a sort of science-fiction/fantasy remix thereof, on the order of Socrates' Egyptian deities Theuth and Thamus. The only guess I've got for "Zhule" is that it might be the spelling of Th[o]ule (the place-name) in some European language other than English or Latin.
Similarities, or the Lack Thereof
While the parallels between Osiris and Jesus are indeed fascinatingly striking, we do know that in the Gospel accounts Jesus is never dismembered, some emphasis being made in pointing out that while his wounds were gruesome, none of his bones were ever broken. With Osiris, an important aspect of his story certainly is that his corpse gets chopped to pieces and then later reassembled before his resurrection. The canonical Bible is vague and controversial, even among Christians, as to whether Jesus descended into the Underworld after death or not.
At this point, however, Christ parallels Osiris in an especially inverse manner, in that Osiris does not, at least in the original Egyptian version of his story, ascend into heaven; he descends towards or remains in the Underworld and it is there that he becomes the judge of the dead. Christ on the other hand, does in fact ascend into heaven and there is a distinct emphasis on his upcoming return to the mortal realm before an eschatological judgement of the dead. But most importantly for the purposes of Graves's book title, Osiris is never crucified! Quite poetically, he gets entombed alive, in a sense, and this is what causes his death.
I point all that out in order to compare both Osiris and Jesus with Thoulis, and, as it happens, there is nothing connecting Thoulis with the other two that is as remarkable as the noted similarities between Osiris and Jesus, or as Graves would like there to be. John does not tell us that Thoulis is crucified in any fashion, nor is there any reason for us to necessarily understand his death in this way. If we are supposed to link him to Osiris, then we have seen that, as a matter of fact, this compels us even less to think of crucifixion.
While Osiris, in the original Egyptian religion and mythology, is indeed some sort of "salvific" figure ("messianic" in the ancient Israelite sense, I think, is pushing it just a little bit), Thoulis definitely is not. He is quite obviously a cautionary tale of someone you do not want to be like. In the Khronographia, after his story, John moves on to other powerful rulers, who are clearly his own fictionalised renditions of well-known characters from ancient Greco-Egyptian myth and history. Thoulis simply goes the way of all flesh, as it were, no deification, resurrection or ascension or anything of the like on the horizon.
And (w)here we are now
It is really ironic that a Christian writer invented this king and his story in order to promote humility, together with a particularly specific Christian doctrine, and yet Thoulis/Thulis is now, seemingly, best known in new media as some kind of archaic competitor to Christianity (or as the founder of a sort of proto-Christianity). That is perhaps the greatest achievement of Mr Graves with regard to this personage.
(By the way, notice that while Graves is definitely [mis]quoting {ahem!} John Gardner Wilkinson, he never actually gets his name right with his "Mr. Wilkison" references. Like with his "Zulis", it almost feels as if it's there to deliberately throw you off the track.)
Further Reading
- Dr Benjamin Garstad's article, which goes quite in depth,
discussing many more angles to the story and its potential origins, is available
on
Academia.edu.
- Jason Colavito's 2018 translation of the Khronographia is
available on his webpage entitled John Malalas on Ancient
Egypt,
with very helpful notes to further contextualise the situation in the
work's authorship as well as in the scenes taking place in the
stories which it narrates. (It's also a fairly quick read.)
- The Australian Association for Byzantine Studies: Byzantina
Australiensia 4 also has The Chronicle of John Malalas: A
Translation by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys and Roger Scott
with Brian Croke, Jenny Ferber, Simon Franklin, Alan James, Douglas
Kelly, Ann Moffatt, Ann Nixon (Melbourne 1986) on
Calamēo.
- The Khronographia is available in the Greek, with an accompanying Latin translation thereof, on Archive.org.