Hermes "Artaban"
scarf dated 1973
(France, 20th c.)
Magos Foundation Collection
The name of a wise man, son of a king named Artaban, was already circulating in the East in the 3rd century, then in the manuscripts of Mesopotamia from the 10th to the 13th century. The West, nourished by the East, will make this Artaban enter the collective unconscious as the 4th Wise Man. “The Story of the Other Wise Man,” published in the 19th century by the American pastor Henry van Dyke, triggered in the imagination of future generations of authors the true saga of the 4th Wise Man.