| This article is about the Mccay universe Ptah. For the Goa'uld System Lord, see Ptah. |
Ptah was the engineer of the gods, the leader of the non-military component of Ra's Empire schooled in the ways of technology. These were the personnel who tuned the spacecraft engines, built the udajeet gliders, who fashioned raw quartz-crystal into Ra's technological wonders—including the blast-lances the guards were so fond of using for war. The engineer tended to wander the empire, constructing and repairing whatever was needed. He was known as the artificer of Tuat, the moon and planet of which served as Ra's capital.
Unlike others of Ra's ascended humans, Ptah sought knowledge instead of power. He desired to learn and practice the ways of technology, the management and use of the machines tended by the Setim, the original subjects of Ra's before the adoption of humans as the favored primary subjects the Setim had served as Ra's primary engineers before being usurped by Ptah and his human followers, having convinced Ra to record the technological knowledge of the Setim and give them to Ptah's faction of humans. He was married to Hathor, before she seduced Ra to gain more power for herself.
According to the son of the leader of the Setim species, Ptah was the only human who had any real, comprehensive understanding of advanced technology. Indeed, in Hathor's private thoughts, Ptah had used the ancient tactic of withholding knowledge to maintain his own indispensability, just as Ra did. True to form, this was not out of any desire for personal power on Ptah's part, but out of necessity, if he was not utterly secure in his position, he would quickly be weeded out by the darwinistic and cutthroat intrigues of Ra's empire.
Hathor, upon her revival, needed to gain control of the empire's technicians, Hathor met and formed an alliance with him. She later extorted him to cannibalize two nonfunctional pyramid ships to make a single example functional, Ra's eye. In Ra's eye, Ptah installed faulty power transmission equipment to effect delayed sabotage, causing the ship to become nonfunctional once again. This was done presumably out of fear of Hathor's mismanagement of Ra's Empire.