Through the Eras

PhilosophyStanding mummiform statuette of Ptah. BROOKLYN MUSEUM OFART, 08.480.25, CHARLES EDWIN WILBOUR FUND. REPRODUCED BYPERMISSION.water subsided. In human form the creator was Atum,Ptah, Re, Neith, or Khnum. Atum’s name means “undifferentiated.”There are several versions of how Atumcreated the world, but all deal with a body fluid he emittedin order to create. He would either spit, cough, ormasturbate to produce seed. From Atum’s moisture thefirst sexually differentiated couple, a divine pair calledShu and Tefnut, came into being. They are unique innot being the offspring of a couple. The Coffin Textsaffirm that Shu was not formed in an egg, like other beings.The first couple created through sexual procreationwere Geb and Nut, the son and daughter of Shu andTefnut. The following generations included the godsOsiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. This group of ninedeities formed the Ennead of the city of Heliopolis.Ptah, also known as Ptah-Tatenen, was the local god ofMemphis. Ptah used language to create. First he thoughtof what the world should be, then said it out loudin order to create it. The text called the MemphiteTheology—dating roughly to 716–702 B.C.E., thoughscholars once thought it had been copied from an OldKingdom (2625–2170 B.C.E.) text—describes theprocess. The sun god Re was also a creator. In the PyramidTexts, the sun god creates through planning andspeech as did Ptah. However, he adds the concept ofmagic power to animate his planning and speech. Thetexts describe Re’s relationship with these three powersby saying that they travel in his boat with him. The goddessNeith created the world through seven statements.These statements were later called the seven-fold laughof the creator god. Neith’s connection to creation seemsto come from her relationship to a cow goddess calledMehetweret. This cow emerged from the watery darknesswith the sun lodged between her horns. The Egyptiansalso associated this cow with the goddess Hathor.Finally, Neith could be a scarab beetle, another sourceof creation. Later the Egyptians identified the scarab withKhepri, a form of the morning sun. Neith thus lost herprimary connection with creation through the increasedimportance of Hathor and Khepri in the later periods.Yet it appears that early in Egyptian thought, she was animportant figure in creation of the world. Khnum wasa ram-headed god worshipped at temples in Esna and inElephantine, both in Upper (southern) Egypt. As a creator,Khnum worked with his hands to create mankind,the primal egg from which the sun hatched, and the earthitself. He fashioned all of these things on a potter’s wheel.In some versions, Ptah performed these same tasks on apotter’s wheel after he had planned and spoken creation.UNIFIED SYSTEM. For many years Egyptologistshave tried to organize all of this information about creationinto a coherent whole. They have suggested thatcertain traditions were local and believed only at certaintemples. They have tried to organize these stories chronologically,seeing some as more primitive than others andproposing that the sophisticated versions evolved fromthe primitive stories. The Egyptologist Erik Hornungsuggested, on the contrary, that the Egyptians saw eachof these stories as mutually re-enforcing, adding detailand complexity rather than contradicting each other. Nostory was dogma that excluded the possibilities of an-188 Arts and Humanities Through the Eras: Ancient Egypt (2675 B.C.E.–332 B.C.E.)