Ptah

Ptah, the great god of Memphis, is the patron of craftsmen, but the theology attached to him is among the most intellectually striking in the ancient world. The Memphite Theology, preserved on a stone of the eighth century BCE that claims to copy a far older text, has Ptah create the world not by physical act but by thought and speech: he conceives all things in his heart (the Egyptian seat of the mind) and brings them into being by the word of his tongue, so that the gods themselves are his utterance. This account, in which the creator thinks and speaks the world into existence, has often been compared with the creative word of Genesis and the opening of the Gospel of John, though any direct link is unproven and the resemblance is one of type rather than descent.

The Memphite Theology survives on the Shabaka Stone, a basalt slab inscribed under the Kushite pharaoh Shabaka in the eighth century BCE that explicitly claims to copy a much older, worm-eaten original text; the stone was later reused as a millstone, grinding grain for centuries with its inscription facing downward and suffering real damage before Egyptologists recognised its significance in 1901. It is now held in the British Museum, and despite the physical damage and continuing scholarly debate over exactly how old the theology it records really is, it remains one of the most philosophically striking documents to survive from ancient Egyptian religion.

Ptah was the god of the makers. The craftsmen of Egypt were called those whom Ptah has made, and the high priest of Memphis bore the title Greatest of the Directors of Craftsmen, a role linking the god to the metalworkers, sculptors and architects whose work sustained the temples and tombs. With his fierce consort Sekhmet and the young god Nefertem he formed the Memphite triad. Ptah's reach even shows in the name of the country: one form of the name of his great Memphis sanctuary, Hut-ka-Ptah (the mansion of the ka of Ptah), is widely thought to lie, by way of Greek, behind the word Aigyptos, Egypt itself. As a mummiform creator holding a composite staff he was worshipped for the whole span of pharaonic history.

Ptah's cult at Memphis was closely bound to that of the sacred Apis bull, understood as the god's living herald or ba made manifest on earth; each Apis bull, identified by specific markings, lived in honour at Memphis and, upon its death, was mummified and buried with great ceremony in the vast underground galleries of the Serapeum at nearby Saqqara, where the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette rediscovered dozens of massive granite sarcophagi still in place in 1850, one of the more spectacular archaeological finds of nineteenth-century Egypt and a direct physical record of a cult practice tied to Ptah that ran for well over a thousand years.