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(West Asian mythology)

A leading member of the Egyptian pantheon. His cult centre was at Memphis, where he had the lion goddess Sakhmet as wife and Nefertem as son. At the beginning of things Ptah existed as Nun, the primeval waters. By speech or by kneading mud Ptah-Nun created the world. In one text he is even credited with the birth of Atum, the form Re assumed in the Heliopolitan creation myth. Thus the priests of Ptah tried to incorporate the principal elements of rival doctrines in their own cosmology. A more local merger took place with a necropolis god so that the deity of Memphis was Ptah-Sokar.

Ptah was represented as a person, always holding the ankh, the symbol of life and the generative forces in the universe. He may have been regarded as a smith god, because the Greeks associated him with Hephaistos, their god of the crafts. In Memphis, too, was the popular cult of the Apis Bull. A large number of bulls and cows were held to be sacred, but the various cults were eclipsed by the veneration displayed for the bull of Memphis. One Apis Bull was alive at a time, the next inhabitant of the sacred enclosure not being chosen by a panel of divines till the mummified body, robed like a prince, had been laid to rest in a sarcophagus alongside those of its predecessors. The priests of several prominent Egyptian gods took part in ceremonies associated with the Apis Bull. The exact relation of Ptah to the animal is unclear, but on death it was said to have become an Osiris.

 
 
Dictionary: Ptah  (ptä, ptäKH) pronunciation
n. Mythology.

The Egyptian creator god and patron deity of artisans.


 

Ptah, holding the emblems of life and power, bronze statuette, Memphis, c. 600 – 100 …
(click to enlarge)
Ptah, holding the emblems of life and power, bronze statuette, Memphis, c. 600 – 100 … (credit: Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum)
In Egyptian religion, the creator god. The patron of craftsmen, especially sculptors, Ptah was identified by the Greeks with Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith. He was represented as a man in mummy form, wearing a skullcap and a short, straight false beard. He was originally the local deity of Memphis, capital of Egypt from the 1st dynasty onward; the political importance of Memphis caused Ptah's cult to spread across Egypt. With Sekhmet and Nefertem, he was one of the Memphite Triad of deities.

For more information on Ptah, visit Britannica.com.

 

[Di]

God of Memphis, Egypt in ancient Egypt, patron of crafts, guardian of artists and artisans, and often represented as a mummy.

 
(ptä) , in Egyptian religion, great god of Memphis. He was one of the important gods of ancient Egypt and, according to Memphite theology, created the universe through the thought of his heart and the utterance of his tongue. As master craftsman, he was a patron of metalworkers and artisans. The Greeks identified him with Hephaestus.


 
Wikipedia: Ptah

Ptah also refers to the asteroid 5011 Ptah

Ptah
in hieroglyphs
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t
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Ptah
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Ptah

In Egyptian mythology, Ptah (also spelt Peteh) was the deification of the primordial mound in the Ennead cosmogony, which was more literally referred to as Ta-tenen (also spelt Tathenen), meaning risen land, or as Tanen, meaning submerged land.

It was said (in the Shabaka Stone) that it was Ptah who called the world into being, having dreamt creation in his heart, and speaking it, his name meaning opener, in the sense of opener of the mouth. Indeed the opening of the mouth ceremony, performed by priests at funerals to release souls from their corpses, was said to have been created by Ptah. Atum was said to have been created by Ptah to rule over the creation, sitting upon the primordial mound.

In art, he is portrayed as a bearded mummified man, often wearing a skull cap, with his hands holding an ankh, was, and djed, the symbols of life, power and stability, respectively. It was also considered that Ptah manifested himself in the Apis bull.

In Memphis, Ptah was worshipped in his own right, and was seen as Atum's father, or rather, the father of Nefertum, the younger form of Atum. When the beliefs about the Ennead and Ogdoad were later merged, and Atum was identified as Ra (Atum-Ra), himself seen as Horus (Ra-Herakhty), this led to Ptah being said to be married to Sekhmet, at the time considered the earlier form of Hathor, Horus', thus Atum's, mother.

Stucco relief of Ptah with staff and ankh and djed.  Late Period or Ptolemaic Dynasty, 4th to 3rd century BC.
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Stucco relief of Ptah with staff and ankh and djed. Late Period or Ptolemaic Dynasty, 4th to 3rd century BC.

Since Ptah was the primordial mound, and had called creation into being, he was considered the god of craftsmen, and in particular stone-based crafts. Eventually, due to the connection of these things to tombs, and that at Thebes, the craftsmen regarded him so highly as to say that he controlled their destiny. Consequently, first amongst the craftsmen, then the population as a whole, Ptah also became a god of reincarnation. Since Seker was also god of craftsmen, and of re-incarnation, Seker was later assimilated with Ptah becoming Ptah-Seker.

Ptah-Seker gradually became seen as the personification of the sun during the night, since the sun appears to be re-incarnated at this time, and Ptah was the primordial mound, which lay beneath the earth. Consequently, Ptah-Seker became considered an underworld deity, and eventually, by the Middle Kingdom, become assimilated by Osiris, the lord of the underworld, occasionally being known as Ptah-Seker-Osiris.

Legend has it that Ancient Egyptians believed saying Ptah's name would give the spouse of the speaker great fertility.









Origin of name

An egyptian worshipping Ptah
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An egyptian worshipping Ptah

Ptah's original name in Ancient Egyptian is reconstructed to have been pronounced as *Pitáḥ based on the occurrence of his name in hieroglyphics, ptḥ, surviving into Coptic as Ptah, just as it is now written in English. The name was also borrowed early on into Greek as Φθα Phtha.



 
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Egyptian Mythology
www.pantheon.org
 
 
 

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Copyrights:

World Mythology Dictionary. A Dictionary of World Mythology. Copyright © Arthur Cotterell 1979, 1986, 2003. All rights reserved.  Read more
Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Archaeology Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ptah" Read more

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