Inscribed c. 700 BCE, claiming a much older original
Creation by speech at Memphis
Ptah conceives the world in his heart and speaks it into existence, and the text arguing this is a piece of political propaganda.
Ptah thinks the world in his heart, which for an Egyptian is the organ of thought rather than of feeling, and then speaks it with his tongue. The gods come into being as his teeth and lips. Everything that exists does so because it was conceived and then named, and the account extends to abstractions: the text says the same process produced justice, craft and the offering rituals.
The Shabaka Stone, on which this survives, opens by claiming to be a copy of a worm-eaten ancient papyrus that King Shabaka found and had recut in stone to preserve it. The stone was later used as a millstone, which destroyed the middle of the text.
Where it comes from
The Shabaka Stone
About this sourceInscribed c. 700 BCE, now in the British Museum. How much of it is genuinely old is disputed, and the claim of antiquity served a purpose.
What is late, foreign or single-source
The claim to be copying an ancient papyrus is exactly the kind of claim a Twenty-fifth Dynasty king would want to make. Some Egyptologists have argued for an Old Kingdom original on linguistic grounds and others for a wholly Late Period composition. It is safest to treat the ideas as possibly old and the document as what it is: a monument set up in 700 BCE.
What the story was for
Ranking Memphis above Heliopolis, and Ptah above Atum. The theological move is elegant: it does not deny the Heliopolitan creation, it subordinates it by saying that Atum himself only came into being because Ptah thought and spoke him. That an intellectual account of creation by word appears here, centuries before comparable ideas elsewhere, is genuinely remarkable, and so is the fact that it was written to win an argument between two cities.
Other myths