Ptah ptḥ

Overview

Ptah is the patron of everyone who makes things — sculptors, metalworkers, masons, architects — and his high priest carried the title "greatest of the directors of craftsmen." Egypt's monumental building culture had a god at the top of its trade, and he was taken seriously.

He is also the author of the most philosophically ambitious creation account the tradition produced. In the Memphite theology, Ptah does not create by hand, by seed, or by dismembering anything. He creates by conceiving a thing in the heart and naming it with the tongue — thought and speech. Everything that exists, gods included, comes into being because Ptah thought it and said it.

That this account is roughly contemporary with, and in open competition against, the Heliopolitan and Hermopolitan cosmogonies is the point. Egypt did not have one creation story. It had rival ones, held by rival priesthoods in rival cities, all orthodox at once.

Attestation history

Old Kingdom. Ptah is attested from early, and Memphis is the political capital, which does his standing no harm. Craft associations are present from the start.

New Kingdom. He is one of the three great state gods — Ptah of Memphis, Ra of Heliopolis, Amun of Thebes — and Ramesside royal inscriptions treat the three as a set. Ramesses II built extensively for him.

The Shabaka Stone. The principal witness for the Memphite theology is a basalt slab, now in the British Museum, inscribed under the Twenty-fifth Dynasty king Shabaka (c. 700 BCE). Its own text claims to be copied from a worm-eaten papyrus of much greater age. Whether the theology is genuinely Old Kingdom or a Late Period composition claiming antiquity is a real and unresolved scholarly question — and a useful reminder that Egyptian texts make claims about their own age which need testing like any other claim.

The stone was later reused as a millstone, which destroyed the middle of the text. What survives is one of the most quoted passages in Egyptology.

What the texts say

Creation by heart and tongue. The heart conceives; the tongue commands; the thing exists. In the Memphite account the Ennead of Heliopolis itself is produced this way — a direct theological annexation of the rival cosmogony, absorbing it rather than denying it.

Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. Ptah fuses with Sokar, the Memphite falcon god of the necropolis, and then with Osiris, producing a composite funerary deity. Figures of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris — painted wooden statuettes, often hollow and containing a papyrus — are common in later burials.

The Apis bull. The living Apis bull at Memphis was regarded as a manifestation of Ptah [herodotus-ii]. On its death it was mummified and buried in the Serapeum at Saqqara, and a successor was sought by physical markings. This is one of the most concrete places where Egyptian religion is verifiable archaeologically: the bull burials are there, in sequence, underground.

Iconography

Ptah is easy to identify and unusual in form: a mummiform man — wrapped, arms free at the front — wearing a tight-fitting skullcap and a straight beard, holding a composite staff that unites the was (dominion), the djed (stability), and the ankh (life). He often stands within a shrine or on a plinth shaped like the hieroglyph for maat.

He is one of the few major gods shown with no animal head at all, and the skullcap is unique to him.

Cult and practice

Memphis was his city and one of the great temple complexes of the ancient world, of which very little now stands. The name of that temple — ḥwt-kꜣ-ptḥ — passed into Greek as Aigyptos and became the modern name of the country. Egypt is, etymologically, named after Ptah's temple.

The Serapeum at Saqqara holds the Apis burials. The Ptah-Sekhmet-Nefertem triad structured Memphite worship. Craftsmen's votive stelae to Ptah survive in numbers, including from the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina — evidence of worship by the people who actually cut the tombs.

Reception

Greeks identified Ptah with Hephaestus, the divine smith [herodotus-ii] — one of the better interpretatio graeca matches, since both are craftsman gods, though it drops the creation-by-word theology entirely.

The Memphite creation account has attracted attention far outside Egyptology for its resemblance to later conceptions of creation through the word. Those comparisons are old and contested, and belong in reception rather than in the Egyptian record.

See also the Eighth Division — four rams in that division are four forms of Tathenen (Ptah-Tatenen), each with the symbol of linen bandages before him, and Ra "singeth a song of joy" at their voices. The four are distinguished by what they wear between the horns: (1) the solar disk, (2) the crown of the South, (3) the crown of the North, (4) the solar disk with a pair of plumes [budge-1905].

Not to be confused with Khnemu's four rams — a separate set, four ram's heads on one body, symbolising Ra, Shu, Seb and Osiris, in which form Khnemu is called Sheft-hat [budge-1904]. Two different fours, two different gods; see khnum. C242 closed.