Ptah, the great, is the mind and tongue of the gods.…
It (the mind) is the one that bringeth forth every successful issue.
It is the tongue which repeats the thought of the mind:
It (the mind) was the fashioner of all gods …
At a time when every divine word
Came into existence by the thought of the mind,
And the command of the tongue.[6]
Although Breasted first thought that this fragment was a survival from the Empire period (c. 1500 B.C.), he has since become convinced, like Erman, that it must, on the basis of orthography, be relegated to the Pyramid Age.
“Is there not here,” Breasted asks, “the primeval germ of the later Alexandrian doctrine of the ‘Logos’?”[7]
In India Brahma (neuter) was the World Soul, “that [[304]]subtle essence” which, according to the composers of the Upanishads, exists in everything that is, but cannot be seen. The personal Brahma, as Prajapati, arose, at the beginning, from this impersonal World Soul. “Mind (or Soul, manas),” an Indian sage has declared, “was created from the non-existent. Mind created Prajapati. Prajapati created offspring. All this, whatever exists, rests absolutely on mind.”