{"it":{"id":"TX019","kind":"text","sub":"Egyptian","name":"Shabaka Stone (Memphite Theology)","place":"London","date":"Inscribed c.710 BCE (25th Dyn.), claims to copy worm-eaten older text; composition…","oldest":"c.710 BCE","inst":"EA 498, British Museum [institution number unverified this session]","lang":"Egyptian","src":[217,516],"lat":51.519,"lon":-0.127,"tags":["Egypt","Egypt"],"sum":"A slab of dark stone in the British Museum carries one of the strangest texts from ancient Egypt. It is the Shabaka Stone, made about 710 BC for King Shabaka of the 25th Dynasty and set up in the temple of Ptah at Memphis.\n\nIt is 95 cm high, 137 cm wide and weighs 585 kg. Its sixty columns of text tell how the god Ptah created the world by the spoken word. The text claims to copy an old document that had been eaten by worms. At some later point the stone was reused as the lower stone of a mill, and the grinding wore away much of the middle. James Breasted first published it in 1901.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is its age. The museum notes that the worm-eaten story is a known device, and the text is generally held to have been written in Shabaka's own time with old spellings. Yet scholars still disagree. Some see a 25th-Dynasty work, while Schlögl dates it to the 19th Dynasty.\n\nThe mainstream view is that the stone may be political as well as religious, a way to win over Memphis by giving its god Ptah first place in creation. Nobody has shown which older document, if any, it copied.\n\nWas the worm-eaten original real, or a story that made the new text old?","why":"A stela that claims to copy a worm-eaten book ended up as a millstone.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Look at photos of the grinding damage.","rel":["TX023"],"hook":"A 585 kg stone says Ptah made the world by speech, then became a millstone."},"S":{"217":["www.britishmuseum.org","https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498"],"516":["Wikipedia: Shabaka Stone","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabaka_Stone"]},"rec":{"id":"TX019","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA122","a":"Ancient 'advanced knowledge' text.","who":"various","main":"Theological creation by logos; most now date composition late (Junge 1973).","ms":"https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Theological creation by logos; most now date composition late (Junge 1973).","alternative_reading":"Ancient 'advanced knowledge' text.","alt_proponent":"various","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Dating dispute is the key issue.","key_theme":"Ptah creates by heart (thought) and tongue (word)","language":"Egyptian","physical_object_institution":"EA 498, British Museum [institution number unverified this session]","composition_date":"Inscribed c.710 BCE (25th Dyn.), claims to copy worm-eaten older text; composition debated (OK vs Ramesside vs 25th Dyn.)","oldest_ms_date":"c.710 BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0753","t":"www.britishmuseum.org","u":"https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Shabaka Stone","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabaka_Stone"}],"qs":["Was the worm-eaten original real, or a story that made the new text old?","Why would a king give a city's god the first act of creation?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Shabaka_Stone_at_the_British_Museum.jpg/1280px-Shabaka_Stone_at_the_British_Museum.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shabaka_Stone_at_the_British_Museum.jpg","title":"Shabaka Stone at the British Museum.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Sanjay ach","cap":"The Shabaka Stone, sometimes Shabaqo, is a relic incised with an ancient Egyptian religious text, which dates from the twenty-fifth dynasty of Egypt. Picture ta"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/British_Museum_2024-10-03w.jpg/1280px-British_Museum_2024-10-03w.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_2024-10-03w.jpg","title":"British Museum 2024-10-03w.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Djehouty","cap":"London, United Kingdom: British Museum, Shabaka Stone, ancient Egyptian stone slab with theological text (later reused as a millstone), stone conglomerate, Memp"}],"sum":"# The Shabaka Stone: A God Who Made the World by Speaking\n\nSome time before 1805, a naval vessel left Alexandria for England with stones in her hold. They were ballast, weight to keep the vessel steady at sea, and they happened to be Egyptian antiquities: a column capital, fragments of a basalt capital from the Greco-Roman age, two pieces of a quartzite lintel of the pharaoh Senusret III, a kneeling granite statue of Ramesses II, and a heavy, scarred slab of dark stone with a square hole in its centre and deep grooves radiating out from it like the spokes of a wheel. In 1805 George Spencer, the second Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty and a trustee of the British Museum, gave the slab to the museum. It has been there ever since, catalogued as EA 498.\n\nNearly a century passed before anyone could read it properly. In 1901 the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted published the first decipherment and translation, and the stone that had crossed the Mediterranean as ballast turned out to carry one of the most remarkable ideas in the ancient world: that a god created everything, including the other gods, by thinking and speaking.\n\n## What the stone is\n\nThe Shabaka Stone is about 137 centimetres wide and between 91 and 95 centimetres high, and it weighs 585 kilograms. Breasted thought it was black granite; others called it basalt or conglomerate. A recent analysis by a British Museum scientist identified it as green breccia from the Wadi Hammamat, the great quarry valley in Egypt's Eastern Desert. Its written surface, about 132 centimetres across, once held some sixty columns of hieroglyphs.\n\nIt takes its name from the king who commissioned it. Shabaka was a Kushite pharaoh, a ruler from Nubia, in what is now Sudan, whose family conquered Egypt and ruled it as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. He reigned around 705 to 690 BC by one reckoning; the museum dates the stone to about 710 BC. He set it up in the Great Temple of Ptah at Memphis, the ancient capital near modern Cairo. The first line gives his full royal titles, calling him \"beloved of Ptah-South-of-His-Wall.\" The second line explains why the stone exists. Shabaka, inspecting the temple, had found an old papyrus there, eaten by worms and falling apart. He ordered what survived to be copied onto stone so it would last.\n\n## The god of craftsmen\n\nThe text has two parts. The first, lines 3 to 47, tells how Egypt was united. Horus, as a form of Ptah, rules Lower Egypt while his rival Set rules Upper Egypt, until the earth god Geb gives the whole land to Horus. Memphis is the place where this unification happens, and also, the text adds, where the body of Osiris drifted ashore and was buried.\n\nThe second part, lines 48 to 64, is the passage that has made the stone famous. Egyptologists call it the Memphite Theology. Ptah was the patron god of craftsmen, metalworkers and architects, a divine maker. Here he becomes the maker of everything. In the British Museum's translation: \"It is Ptah, the very great, who has given life to all the gods through the heart and through the tongue.\" For the Egyptians the heart was the seat of thought. \"Sight, hearing, breathing, they report to the heart, and it makes every understanding come forth. As for the tongue, it repeats what the heart has devised. In this way, all the gods were born.\" Every divine word, \"every hieroglyph,\" came from \"what the heart devised and what the tongue commanded.\" So were created \"all trades\" and \"all arts, and the movements of all limbs.\" And when it was done, \"Ptah was satisfied after he had made all things and all hieroglyphs.\"\n\nCreation here is first an act of mind. Only then does the physical work begin, carried out by Atum, the creator god of the rival city of Heliopolis, who in this version is himself brought into being by Ptah's teeth and lips. Thought, then word, then matter. Readers have long noticed how close this comes to the opening of the Gospel of John, \"In the beginning was the Word,\" written many centuries later.\n\n## The millstone\n\nThe stone's damage is part of its story. The square hole in the centre, about 12 by 14 centimetres, and the eleven rough grooves around it destroyed the inscription across a circle some 78 centimetres wide. The usual explanation, first suggested in the museum's display of 1821, is that someone later used the slab as the bottom stone of a mill. Another suggestion is that it served as the base of something round, a column or pillar. Either way, a text about the creative power of words was ground away by people who could not read it.\n\nNot all the damage was accidental. The name of Seth, by then a condemned god, was cut out of line 7. A later pharaoh, Psamtik II or Psamtik III, erased Shabaka's names. Psamtik III carved his own name instead, and the Persians erased that in turn when they conquered Egypt.\n\n## How old is the idea?\n\nThe great puzzle of the Shabaka Stone is its age. If the worm-eaten papyrus was real and very old, the stone preserves a philosophy of creation by word from the dawn of Egyptian history. Its language is archaic, close to that of the Pyramid Texts, and it treats Memphis as the first royal city. Breasted, Adolf Erman, Kurt Sethe and Hermann Junker all dated the original to the Old Kingdom, and Henri Frankfort, John Wilson, Miriam Lichtheim and Erik Iversen agreed. The physiologist Homer W. Smith went further, placing it in the First Dynasty and calling it \"the oldest written record of human thought.\"\n\nThen the consensus turned. In 1973 Friedrich Junge argued that the text was composed in Shabaka's own time, written in deliberately old-fashioned language, and most scholars since have followed him. The British Museum notes that the worm-eaten book is a known literary device for lending a new text the authority of age. Others, such as Schlögl, place the composition in the Nineteenth Dynasty. Today the view is that it cannot be earlier than that.\n\nThe mainstream reading, then, sees the stone as theology with a political edge. Shabaka was a foreign king winning over the old capital. By giving Memphis and its god Ptah first place in creation, above Atum of Heliopolis, the text honoured the city's priests and their claims. The scholar Ragnhild Bjerre Finnestad lists three possible purposes: to assert the Memphite religious system over the Heliopolitan, to assert the priesthood of Memphis over that of Heliopolis, and to present a theory of being itself.\n\nYet the argument cuts both ways. A text written to look old must imitate something people already accepted as old. If the idea of a god who made the world by thought and word was a Kushite invention of the eighth century BC, why did its authors take such pains to disguise it as a fragile survivor from Egypt's beginnings, and what were they copying when they did?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c. 710 BCE","h":"Inscribed c.710 BCE (25th Dyn.), claims to copy worm-eaten older text; composition","s":[293]},{"v":"c.710 BCE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[293]},{"v":"Egyptian","h":"Language","s":[293]}],"hs":{"293":["www.britishmuseum.org","https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA498"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX019.webp","w":1280,"h":833,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Shabaka_Stone_at_the_British_Museum.jpg/1280px-Shabaka_Stone_at_the_British_Museum.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}