In Babylonia, Ea, the culture-god and creator, was also termed the "potter," and it was thus that he moulded the gods as well as men.(102) At the same time, like Khnum, he was a god of the waters. While the Cataract of the Nile was the home of Khnum, the Persian Gulf was the dwelling-place of Ea. The connection between the water and the modeller in clay is obvious. It is only where the water inundates the soil and leaves the moist clay behind it that the art of the potter can flourish.(103)
But was there also a connection between the Babylonian god who was worshipped in the ancient seaport of Chaldæa and the god of the Egyptian Cataract? We have seen that the wife of Khnum was entitled "the Asiatic," the very form of the name being Babylonian. We have further seen that her companion Ânuqet was also from Asia, and that her traditional head-dress preserved a memory of the fact. There is a road from the Red Sea to Assuan as well as to El-Kab; it may be that it goes back to those prehistoric times when the Pharaonic Egyptians made their way across the desert into the valley of the Nile, as their Semitic kinsfolk 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 Ptah, 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) Ptah 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 of Memphis.(106) At any rate, Ptah and Khnum are alike forms of the same primitive deity, and the names they bear are epithets merely. At Philæ, Ptah 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)