Bastet

In the Second Dynasty, around 2890 BCE, stone vessel sherds at Saqqara show a lioness-headed goddess holding an ankh and a papyrus scepter. She is indistinguishable from Sekhmet. Same fangs, same posture, same war-goddess menace.

Two thousand years later, she is a seated domestic cat with kittens at her feet, holding a sistrum, presiding over the largest festival in Egypt.

No other deity in any religion underwent a transformation this complete over a span this long.

The Name

Her name is written with the hieroglyph for an ointment jar: bꜣs. The feminine suffix -t gives Bastet. Stephen Quirke’s interpretation: “She of the Ointment Jar.” The bas jar held perfumes and protective ointments. A goddess named after a cosmetics container who began her career as an instrument of the sun god’s wrath.

The Greeks heard Boubastis and called her city by that name. They identified her with Artemis, the huntress, finding common ground in the protection of women and childbirth. Herodotus visited Bubastis around 440 BCE, called it “the most pleasing to the eye” of Egyptian temples, and described a festival that made every other gathering in Egypt look restrained.

The Transformation

The timeline of the most dramatic character change in Egyptian religion:

In the Old Kingdom, Bastet is a lioness, one of several Eyes of Ra: the sun god’s destructive force sent against his enemies. Identical to Sekhmet in function and appearance. The Pyramid Texts reference her as a fierce protector.

By the Middle Kingdom, the split begins. Tomb paintings show the first domestic cats as pets. Bastet starts absorbing the gentler aspects while Sekhmet retains the destructive ones. A 12th Dynasty text articulates the double nature: lioness and cat, protective yet dangerous.

By the New Kingdom (after c. 1100 BCE), the cat-headed form becomes primary. The lioness fades.

The completion came with the Twenty-Second Dynasty (c. 943-716 BCE). Pharaoh Shoshenq I and his successors ruled from Bubastis. They made their local cat goddess a national deity. She was now fully the cat: seated, gentle, associated with home, fertility, childbirth, joy. The war portfolio stayed with Sekhmet. The sistrum stayed with Hathor. Bastet kept the purring.

The theological framework existed in the pacification myth, covered in the Sekhmet and Ra entries. The raging lioness drinks the red beer, passes out, wakes as something gentler. What the Bastet entry adds is the question from the other side: what is the theological weight of being the goddess who was once terrifying and became gentle? Not a demotion. An evolution. The ointment-jar name suggests it was always there: protection through presence rather than through violence.

The Festival

Herodotus described it in Histories II.59-60, and nothing else in his Egyptian chapters matches it for energy.

Seven hundred thousand men and women attended, he wrote, “according to the people of the place.” The number is certainly exaggerated. The scale was real. It was the most attended festival in all Egypt.

Pilgrims traveled by boat. Women played flutes, shook castanets and sistra. Men played pipes. When boats passed riverside towns, women shouted insults at women on shore and lifted their skirts. This was anasyrma, ritual obscenity standard in Egyptian fertility festivals, not scandal but sacred practice. “More grape wine is drunk at this feast,” Herodotus noted, “than in the whole year beside.”

Seven hundred thousand people did not show up for a diminished goddess. They showed up for the most popular deity in Egypt. The gentle version drew bigger crowds than the terrifying one ever did.

The Millions

By the Late Period, devotion to Bastet had become an industry.

Temples operated cat breeding farms. Kittens were raised to be killed, often by a broken neck or blunt force to the skull just months after birth, and mummified as votive offerings. Pilgrims purchased them at the temple and offered them to Bastet, carrying prayers on behalf of the dedicator. Over 300,000 mummified cats were found at Bubastis alone. The Bubasteion at Saqqara yielded thousands more.

In 2015, Lidija McKnight at the University of Manchester published CT scan results from approximately 800 animal mummies. One-third contained complete animals. One-third contained partial remains. One-third contained no animal at all: mud, sticks, reeds, eggshells. The same priestly economies documented for Thoth’s ibis mummies applied to Bastet’s cats. Pilgrims paid for gods. They sometimes received packaging.

In February 1890, a farmer at Beni Hasan discovered a massive cat cemetery. Approximately 180,000 mummified cats weighing 19.5 tons were shipped from Alexandria to Liverpool. They were sold at auction at three pounds, thirteen shillings, and nine pence per ton. The auctioneer used a mummified cat skull as his gavel. The cats were ground into fertilizer and spread across English fields.

The Ban

Egypt banned the export of cats. A dedicated branch of government was formed to deal with cat smuggling. Government agents were dispatched abroad to find and retrieve cats that had been smuggled out of the country. The army sometimes got involved. Diodorus Siculus recorded these measures. Despite the ban, cats were smuggled out, likely by Phoenician traders, which is how the domestic cat eventually spread to Greece, Rome, and across the Mediterranean.

The article on The Cat’s Other Life traces the full cultural history of cats across ten civilizations, from Bastet’s temples to the medieval European persecution that may have worsened the Black Death.

What Survives

Bubastis is a ruin. The festival ended. The breeding farms closed. The catacombs are sealed. The 180,000 cats at Beni Hasan are fertilizer in English soil, and the auctioneer’s gavel, the cat skull he used to close the sale, is probably in a landfill.

But there are more cats in human households today than at any point in history. The African wildcat (Felis lybica) that Egyptians domesticated, that killed the snakes in the grain stores, that became a goddess and then a mummy and then fertilizer, is the direct ancestor of every domestic cat alive. The species thrived by being useful, then sacred, then companionable. Bastet’s transformation from lioness to house cat is the cat’s own story: a predator that chose proximity to humans and won.

The ointment jar that gave her name held protection. The lioness protected through violence. The cat protects through presence. Both work. The gentle version outlasted the fierce one by three thousand years and counting.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Second Dynasty stone vessel sherds from Saqqara (c. 2890 BCE): earliest Bastet inscriptions, lioness form
• Herodotus, Histories II.59-60, II.66-67 (c. 440 BCE): festival at Bubastis, cat mourning rituals
• Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica I.83 (c. 60 BCE): Roman soldier killed by mob for accidentally killing a cat
• Lidija McKnight, RadioGraphics (2015): CT scans showing one-third of cat mummies contain no animal remains