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Ptah

AlsoPtah

The Craftsman God of Memphis Who Created the World by Heart and Tongue

The Gods Between Sky and Earth · Major Gods
CraftCreationMemphis

Who they are

Ptah is the chief god of Memphis, patron of craftsmen, architects, and sculptors, usually shown as a shrouded figure holding a staff. Memphite theology gives him an extremely abstract mode of creation: Ptah first conceives all things in his "heart" (thought), then with his "tongue" (word) speaks them forth, and thus the world is created — one of the ancient world's earliest theologies of "creation by thought and word," predating the "God said, let there be light" of Genesis by a thousand years and often compared with it by scholars. As god of craft, he is also the source of all that is "made," and every skilled artisan of ancient Egypt held him as founder. With the lion goddess Sekhmet and the lotus god Nefertum he forms the Memphite triad. The Western etymology of the word "Egypt" (Aegyptus) is said by one account to come from the name of Ptah's temple, "House of the Ka of Ptah" (Hut-ka-Ptah).

Key stories

Making the World by Heart and Tongue

The priests of Memphis put forward a subtle cosmogony: Ptah first conceives the forms of all things in his heart, then speaks their names with his tongue, and all that is spoken comes into being. The gods, cities, temples, all things are the result of what Ptah "thought and spoke." This differs sharply from the bodily begetting of other Egyptian creation myths — it makes creation an act of thought and language. A thousand years later, the idea "in the beginning was the Word" appears again and again across the Near East and the Mediterranean, and Ptah's heart and tongue are among its oldest forerunners.

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