(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.
