Ptah stands wrapped like a mummy, his hands emerging at the front to grip a single composite staff — the was sceptre of dominion with the djed pillar of stability and the ankh of life fused into one shaft. He wears a tight blue skullcap and a straight beard, and unlike almost every major Egyptian god he has no animal head and no animal form. He is the patron of craftsmen, the god of Memphis, and the author of the most philosophically ambitious creation account Egypt produced.
Creation by heart and tongue
The Memphite Theology survives on the Shabaka Stone, a slab of black granite in the British Museum, inscribed under the Twenty-fifth Dynasty king Shabaka around 700 BCE. Its opening states that the king found a worm-eaten papyrus in the temple and had it copied onto stone so it would endure. The stone was later reused as a millstone — a hole was cut through the centre and radial grooves worn across the text — destroying much of the middle of the inscription. An object explicitly created to preserve a text was very nearly the thing that lost it.
What survives is remarkable. Ptah creates by conceiving the world in his heart, the Egyptian seat of thought, and bringing it into existence by speaking it with his tongue. The text is explicit that this is how everything came about, and it takes trouble to subordinate the rival Heliopolitan scheme: Atum's bodily act of creation is reframed as something that happened by the heart and tongue of Ptah, with the members of the Ennead identified as his teeth and lips. It is a Memphite priesthood arguing that its god was there first, using theology as municipal politics — the same argument Thebes made for Amun and Hermopolis made for its Ogdoad.
The parallel to creation by divine word in Genesis and in the opening of John's Gospel is real and frequently drawn. What it means is contested. The honest position is that conceptual-and-verbal creation was available in Egyptian thought long before the biblical texts, that direct dependence has never been demonstrated, and that shared vocabulary across the ancient Near East is a sufficient explanation without borrowing.
How old is the text?
This is a genuine and unresolved dispute. Shabaka's inscription claims to copy something ancient, and for most of the twentieth century Egyptologists took the composition to be Old Kingdom, making it one of the oldest theological documents in the world. From the 1970s onward, linguistic analysis of its grammar and its literary devices pushed a substantial body of opinion towards a much later date — Ramesside or even close to Shabaka's own reign, with the archaising frame a deliberate claim to antiquity. Neither position has won. Anyone citing the Shabaka Stone as a document of about 2700 BCE is repeating an older consensus that no longer holds unchallenged.
Memphis
His city, Hut-ka-Ptah — "enclosure of the ka of Ptah" — is one of the proposed sources, through Greek transmission, of the name Aigyptos and therefore of the English word Egypt. The country may be named after his temple.
Memphis sat at the junction of Upper and Lower Egypt and was the administrative capital for long stretches of Egyptian history. Ptah's temple there was one of the largest religious complexes in the country, though far less survives than at Karnak; the colossal fallen statue of Ramesses II at Mit Rahina lies in what was its precinct.
His Memphite triad is Ptah, Sekhmet and Nefertem. As with all Egyptian triads, this is a temple arrangement rather than a family from any story, and the family tree marks it as such.
The Apis bull
Memphis housed the Apis, a living bull identified by specific markings and regarded as the ba of Ptah — the god's manifestation on earth. A single animal at a time held the office. It lived in a stall in the temple precinct, was consulted for oracles by the way it moved, and at death was mummified with the full apparatus of a royal burial and interred in the Serapeum at Saqqara, an underground gallery of granite sarcophagi each weighing many tonnes, rediscovered by Auguste Mariette in 1851. Search then began for the next bull.
In the Ptolemaic period the dead Apis, identified with Osiris as Osiris-Apis, was reworked into Serapis, a Greek-looking bearded god designed to be worshipped by Greeks and Egyptians alike. That was a deliberate act of religious policy, and it worked: the Serapis cult spread across the Mediterranean.
Craftsmen, and a god who works
Ptah's high priest carried the title wer kherep hemut, "greatest of the directors of craftsmen", which reads as a chief-of-works title rather than a sacerdotal one. The workmen of Deir el-Medina, the village of artisans who cut and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, kept shrines to him and left votive stelae, several of which record illness or blindness as punishment for an offence and ask for mercy — some of the most personal religious texts to survive from Egypt.
The composite Ptah-Sokar-Osiris merges him with the Memphite funerary hawk Sokar and with Osiris. Painted wooden figures of this three-fold god, often hollow and containing a papyrus or a corn mummy, are a standard element of Late Period burials — creation, the necropolis and resurrection welded into a single object.
Questions about the Memphite creator
Why is he wrapped like a mummy if he is not a god of the dead?
The shroud is better read as the form of a cult statue than as a corpse. Ptah is shown in the shape of the wrapped, rigid, standing image that stood in his shrine, hands free to hold the sceptre; the same convention applies to other gods depicted in their statue form. His funerary associations come later, through the merger with Sokar and Osiris, not from the wrapping.
What is the blue cap?
An unusual piece of headgear, close-fitting and typically coloured blue, and it is his alone among the major gods. It is often compared to the leather or fabric caps worn by metalworkers and craftsmen, which fits his portfolio. The blue itself is likely to mean lapis or faience rather than a literal fabric colour — Egyptian art assigns divine flesh and dress the colours of precious materials.
Was Imhotep really his son?
Imhotep, the historical architect of the Step Pyramid, was deified centuries after his death and was then given Ptah as a father — an entirely posthumous genealogy, assigned because Imhotep's spheres of building and medicine were Memphite and Ptah's. Egyptian religion added parentage to gods the way an institution adds a founder to a lineage.