Patron of the Craftsmen, and the Name of Egypt

Ptah was the god of the makers. The craftsmen of Egypt were called those whom Ptah has made, and the high priest of Memphis bore the title Greatest of the Directors of Craftsmen, a role linking the god to the metalworkers, sculptors and architects whose work sustained the temples and tombs. With his fierce consort Sekhmet and the young god Nefertem he formed the Memphite triad. Ptah's reach even shows in the name of the country: one form of the name of his great Memphis sanctuary, Hut-ka-Ptah (the mansion of the ka of Ptah), is widely thought to lie, by way of Greek, behind the word Aigyptos, Egypt itself. As a mummiform creator holding a composite staff he was worshipped for the whole span of pharaonic history.

Ptah's cult at Memphis was closely bound to that of the sacred Apis bull, understood as the god's living herald or ba made manifest on earth; each Apis bull, identified by specific markings, lived in honour at Memphis and, upon its death, was mummified and buried with great ceremony in the vast underground galleries of the Serapeum at nearby Saqqara, where the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette rediscovered dozens of massive granite sarcophagi still in place in 1850, one of the more spectacular archaeological finds of nineteenth-century Egypt and a direct physical record of a cult practice tied to Ptah that ran for well over a thousand years.