Ptah
The god of Memphis and patron of craftsmen, drawn as a man wrapped like a mummy, in a close cap, holding the was sceptre, the ankh and the djed pillar. The Greeks called him Hephaestus, and the Apis bull of Memphis was thought to hold his soul.
Meaning
Ptah was the god of Memphis, the royal residence city; Budge (1904) calls him the greatest of its old gods. Erman, writing in 1907, calls him “the divine sculptor, who gave and still gives form to all things and all beings on earth”, and says artists and artisans took him as their patron. The Global Egyptian Museum adds that the workmen who built the tombs at Deir el-Medina did too, and that the high priest of Memphis was called the leader of the craftsmen. Artists drew him in human form with the body of a mummy, his hands coming out of the wrappings to hold one or more staffs, usually the ankh, the was sceptre and the djed pillar, with a blue cap on his head (Global Egyptian Museum). Budge describes a bearded man with a bald head in a close-fitting garment, and Erman an ancient statue whose head “appears to be shaven”. In the Memphite triad his wife is Sekhmet and his son Nefertem, and Imhotep, the architect of Djoser’s Step Pyramid, was counted his son as well.
Origin and history
His name has been read two ways. Older writers explained it as “Opener”, the god who opened the day. Budge (1904) rejected that because the Egyptian word, as he read it, is always used in the sense “to engrave, to carve, to chisel”, and he followed Brugsch’s “sculptor, engraver”. The creation told of him is a craftsman’s. The Global Egyptian Museum notes that the Coffin Texts and the Shabaka stone describe creation by the god’s heart and tongue: what he thought and spoke came into being. Budge says he beat out with a hammer the iron slab that made the floor of heaven and the roof of the sky, and that the Pyramid Text of Teti mentions a “workshop of Ptah”, where, Budge reads, he made the new bodies the dead would live in. The Global Egyptian Museum also credits him with designing the Opening of the Mouth ritual.
Herodotus wrote of him under the Greek name Hephaestus. He says the first king, Min, founded Memphis and built in it “the great and most noteworthy temple of Hephaestus”, and that a later king built the temple’s southern court and, facing it, a court where the Apis bull was kept and fed.
Ptah and the Apis bull
The Apis bull lived at Memphis by Ptah’s temple. Erman says the soul of Ptah dwelt in the bull and passed into another when one died; the Global Egyptian Museum calls the bull the ba of Ptah. Why Apis was so honoured, Erman admits, “we cannot now trace”. Herodotus describes the marks of a new Apis: a black calf with a three-cornered white spot on its forehead and the likeness of an eagle on its back. A dead Apis was mummified and buried in the Serapeum (Global Egyptian Museum).
Ptah and Hephaestus
Greek writers took Ptah for their smith god Hephaestus, and Budge thought them right about one of his forms. The image Herodotus describes in the temple of Hephaestus at Memphis was no mummy. He tells how the Persian king Cambyses, staying at Memphis, went into the temple and jeered at it, and says it was like the Pataici that the Phoenicians carried on the prows of their warships: “it is the likeness of a dwarf”. A. D. Godley’s note to his translation identifies the Pataikos as Ptah, “always in the form of a dwarf”.
The pedestal under his feet
Standing, Ptah rests his feet on a pedestal in the shape of the sign read maat, which the Global Egyptian Museum calls the hieroglyph for Maat. Budge (1904) noted that some describe the sign as a cubit and others as a flute, and thought it far more likely a tool of sculptors and carvers, such as a chisel.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsKhnumThe ram-headed creator god of Elephantine at the Nile’s First Cataract, who shaped people on a potter’s wheel. His ram’s horns twist out sideways, which tells him apart from Amun, whose ram’s horns curl.
- Herodotus calls Ptah’s temple at Memphis the temple of Hephaestus; Budge: the Greeks identified one form of Ptah with HephaistosHephaestusThe Greek god of fire and metalwork, the lame smith of the gods. Greek vase painters show him with a hammer and tongs, or riding a donkey back to Mount Olympus with Dionysus.
See also
Djed pillar, Sekhmet, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set.
Sources
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), ch. XVI, pp. 500–503
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 17, 22–24
- Ptah, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, entry
- Apis, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, entry
- Herodotus, Histories 2.99, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 99
- Herodotus, Histories 2.153, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 153
- Herodotus, Histories 3.28, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 3, chapter 28
- Herodotus, Histories 3.37, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 3, chapter 37, and Godley’s note
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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