128 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniakinsfolk did in later days into the tablelands of Abyssinia.
The creator who was worshipped at Memphis, at the other end
of the Nile valley, was a potter also.^104 This was Pta%, whose
name is derived from a root which means to“open.”According
to Porphyry, he had sprung from an egg which had come from
the mouth of Kneph. But the reference in the name is probably to
the ceremony of“opening the mouth”of a mummy, or the statue
of the dead man with a chisel, a finger, or some red pebbles,
in order to confer upon it the capability of receiving the breath
of life, and of harbouring the double or the soul.^105 Pta%was
represented as a mummy; he was, in fact, one of the gods of
the underworld, who, like Osiris or the mummified Horus of
Nekhen, had their tombs as well as their temples. He must have
been the creative potter, however, before he became a mummy.
Perhaps his transformation dates from the period of his fusion
with Sokaris, who seems to have been the god of the cemetery
[139] of Memphis.^106 At any rate, Pta%and Khnum are alike forms
of the same primitive deity, and the names they bear are epithets
merely. At Philæ, Pta%is pictured as about to model man out of
a lump of clay, and the Khnumu, or“creators”who helped him
to fashion the world, were his children.^107
The Khnumu are the Patæki of Herodotos (iii. 37), whose
(^104) Men-nofer (Memphis),“the good place,”is the equivalent of the name of
the ancient seaport of Babylonia, Eridu, the Sumerian Eri-duga or“good city.”
Ea, the culture-god and creator, was the god of Eridu. In the Deluge tablet (l.
9) Ea says that he had not“opened (patû) the oracle of the great gods.”It is
hardly worth while to mention that the antiquity of Memphis has been disputed
by some philologists.
(^105) Pta%is stated in the Book of the Dead to have been the original author of
the ceremony which he first performed on the dead gods.
(^106) This is Maspero's view (Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, ii. pp. 21,
22). Wiedemann (Religion der alten Aegypter, p. 75) makes Sokaris a sun-god;
but his solar attributes belong to the time when he was identified with Ra of
Heliopolis.
(^107) It was only when the sun-god had absorbed the other deities that they
became the children of Ra.