Creation by Heart and Tongue

Ptah, the great god of Memphis, is the patron of craftsmen, but the theology attached to him is among the most intellectually striking in the ancient world. The Memphite Theology, preserved on a stone of the eighth century BCE that claims to copy a far older text, has Ptah create the world not by physical act but by thought and speech: he conceives all things in his heart (the Egyptian seat of the mind) and brings them into being by the word of his tongue, so that the gods themselves are his utterance. This account, in which the creator thinks and speaks the world into existence, has often been compared with the creative word of Genesis and the opening of the Gospel of John, though any direct link is unproven and the resemblance is one of type rather than descent.

The Memphite Theology survives on the Shabaka Stone, a basalt slab inscribed under the Kushite pharaoh Shabaka in the eighth century BCE that explicitly claims to copy a much older, worm-eaten original text; the stone was later reused as a millstone, grinding grain for centuries with its inscription facing downward and suffering real damage before Egyptologists recognised its significance in 1901. It is now held in the British Museum, and despite the physical damage and continuing scholarly debate over exactly how old the theology it records really is, it remains one of the most philosophically striking documents to survive from ancient Egyptian religion.