Bastet, the form of the name which is most commonly adopted by
Egyptologists today, is a modern convention offering one possible reconstruction. In early
Egyptian, her name appears to have been bȝstt, where ȝ represents an
aleph.
[2] In Egyptian writing, the second t marks a feminine ending, but was not usually pronounced, and the aleph ȝ may have moved to a position before the accented syllable, as witnessed by the Aramaic spelling ȝbst.
[2] By the first millennium, then, bȝstt would have been something like 'obest' or 'ubesti' in Egyptian speech.
[2]The town of Bastet's cult (see below) was known in Greek as Boubastis (Βούβαστις). The Hebrew rendering of the name for this town is Pî-beset ("House of Bastet"), spelled without Vortonsilbe.
[2]What the name of the goddess means remains uncertain.
[2] One recent suggestion by Stephen Quirke (Ancient Egyptian Religion) explains it as meaning "She of the ointment jar". This ties in with the observation that her name was written with the hieroglyph "oinment jar" (bȝs) and that she was associated with protective ointments, among other things.
[2]From lion-goddess to cat-goddess
From the third millennium BC, when Bastet begins to appear in our record, she is depicted as either a fierce lioness or a woman with the head of a lion.
[3] Images of Bast were created from a local stone, named
alabaster today.[
citation needed]
Originally she was viewed as the protector goddess of
Lower Egypt. As protector, she was seen as defender of the
pharaoh, and consequently of the later chief male deity,
Ra, who was also a solar deity, gaining her the titles Lady of Flame and
Eye of Ra.
Her role in the pantheon became diminished as
Sekhmet, a similar lioness war deity, became more dominant in the unified culture of Lower and Upper Egypt.[
citation needed]
In the first millennium BC, when domesticated cats were popularly kept as pets, Bastet began to be represented as a woman with the head of a cat and ultimately emerged as the Egyptian cat-goddess par excellence.
[3] In the
Middle Kingdom, the domestic cat appeared as Bastet’s sacred animal and after the New Kingdom she was depicted as a woman with the head of a cat or a lioness, carrying a sacred rattle and a box or basket.
[4]Bubastis
She was a local deity whose cult was centred in the city of
Bubastis, now Tell Basta, which lay in the
Delta near what is known as
Zagazig today.
[3][4] The town, known in
Egyptian as pr-bȝstt (also transliterated as Per-Bast), carries her name, literally meaning "House of Bastet". It was known in Greek as Boubastis (Βούβαστις) and translated into Hebrew as Pî-beset. In the biblical
Book of Ezekiel 30:17, the town appears in the Hebrew form Pibeseth.
[3]Temple
Herodotus, a Greek historian who travelled in Egypt in the 5th century BC, describes Bastet's
temple at some length:
"save for the entrance, it stands on an island; two separate channels approach it from the Nile, and after coming up to the entry of the temple, they run round it on opposite sides; each of them is an hundred feet wide, and overshadowed by trees. The temple is in the midst of the city, the whole circuit of which commands a view down into it; for the city's level has been raised, but that of the temple has been left as it was from the first, so that it can be seen into from without. A stone wall, carven with figures, runs round it; within is a grove of very tall trees growing round a great shrine, wherein is the image of the goddess; the temple is a square, each side measuring a furlong. A road, paved with stone, of about three furlongs' length leads to the entrance, running eastward through the market place, towards the temple of Hermes; this road is about four hundred wide, and bordered by trees reaching to heaven."
[5]The description offered by Herodotus and several Egyptian texts suggest that water surrounded the temple on three (out of four) sides, forming a type of lake known as isheru, not too dissimilar from that surrounding the Temple of the goddess
Mut in
Karnak at Thebes.
[3] Lakes known as isheru were typical of temples devoted to a number of leonine goddesses who are said to represent one original goddess, daughter of the Sun-God Re / Eye of Re: Bastet, Mut,
Tefnut,
Hathor and
Sakhmet.
[3] Each of them had to be appeased by a specific set of rituals.
[3] One myth relates that a lioness, fiery and wrathful, was once cooled down by the water of the lake, transformed into a gentle cat and settled in the temple.
[3]Festival
Herodotus also relates that of the many solemn festivals held in Egypt, the most important and most popular one was that celebrated in Bubastis in honour of the goddess, whom he calls Bubastis and equates with the Greek goddess
Artemis.
[6][7] Each year on the day of her festival, the town is said to have attracted some 700,000 visitors ("as the people of the place say"), both men and women (but not children), who arrived in numerous crowded ships. The women engaged in music, song and dance on their way to the place, great sacrifices were made and prodigious amounts of wine were drunk, more than was the case throughout the year.
[8] This accords well with Egyptian sources which prescribe that leonine goddesses are to be appeased with the "feasts of drunkenness".
[2]The goddess Bast was sometimes depicted holding a ceremonial
sistrum in one hand and an
aegis in the other—the aegis usually resembling a collar or gorget embellished with a
lioness head.
Bast was a goddess of the
sun throughout most of Ancient Egyptian history, but later when she was changed into a cat goddess rather than a lioness, she was changed to a goddess of the
moon by
Greeks occupying Ancient Egypt toward the end of its civilization. In Greek mythology, Bast also is known as Ailuros.
History and connection to other gods
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Cats in ancient Egypt were revered highly, partly due to their ability to combat
vermin such as mice, rats - which threatened key food supplies - and snakes, especially
cobras. Cats of royalty were, in some instances, known to be dressed in golden jewelry and were allowed to eat from their owners' plates. Turner and Bateson estimate that during the Twenty-second dynasty c.945-715 BC, Bastet worship changed to being a major cat deity (as opposed to a lioness deity).
[9] With the unification of the two Egypts, many similar deities were merged into one or the other, the significance of Bast and Sekhmet, to the regional cultures that merged, resulted in a retention of both, necessitating a change to one or the other. During later dynasties, Bast was assigned a lesser role in the pantheon, but retained.
In the temple at
Per-Bast some cats were found to have been
mummified and buried, many next to their owners. More than 300,000 mummified cats were discovered when Bast's temple at Per-Bast was
excavated. The main source of information about the Bast cult comes from Herodotus who visited Bubastis around 450 BC during the heyday of the cult. He equated Bastet with the Greek Goddess
Artemis. He wrote extensively about the cult. Turner and Bateson suggest that the status of the cat was roughly equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might leave a family in great mourning and those who could would have them embalmed or buried in cat cemeteries - pointing to the great prevalence of the cult of Bastet. Extensive burials of cat remains were found not only at
Bubastis, but also at
Beni Hasan and
Saqqara. In 1888, a farmer uncovered a plot of many hundreds of thousands of cats in Beni Hasan.
[9]The lioness represented the war goddess and protector of both lands. As the fierce lion god
Maahes of
Nubia later became part of Egyptian mythology, during the time of the
New Kingdom, Bastet was held to be the daughter of
Amun Ra, a newly ascending deity in the Egyptian pantheon during that late dynasty. Bastet became identified as his mother in the Lower Egypt, near the delta. Similarly the fierce lioness war goddess
Sekhmet, became identified as the mother of Maashes in the
Upper Egypt.
Wadjet-Bast, with a lioness head of Bast, the solar disk, and the cobra that represents Wadjet
As divine mother, and more especially as protector, for Lower Egypt, Bastet became strongly associated with
Wadjet, the patron goddess of Lower Egypt. She eventually became Wadjet-Bast, paralleling the similar pair of patron (
Nekhbet) and lioness protector (
Sekhmet) for Upper Egypt. Bast fought an evil snake named Apophis.
Later perception
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Later scribes sometimes renamed her Bastet, a variation on Bast consisting of an additional
feminine suffix to the one already present, thought to have been added to emphasize
pronunciation; perhaps it is a diminutive name applied as she receded in the ascendancy of
Sekhmet in the
Egyptian pantheon. Since Bastet literally meant, (female) of the ointment jar,[
citation needed] Her name was related with the lavish jars in which Egyptians stored their perfume. Bast thus gradually became regarded as the goddess of
perfumes, earning the title, perfumed protector. In connection with this, when
Anubis became the god of embalming, Bast, as goddess of ointment, came to be regarded as his wife. The association of Bastet as mother of Anubis, was broken years later when Anubis became identified as the son of
Nephthys.
Ancient Egyptian statue of Bastet
The
Gayer-Anderson cat, believed to be a representation of Bastet
Lower Egypt's loss in the wars between Upper and Lower Egypt led to a decrease in the ferocity of Bast. Thus, by the
Middle Kingdom she came to be regarded as a
domestic cat rather than a lioness. Occasionally, however, she was depicted holding a lioness mask, hinting at her potential ferocity.
Because domestic cats tend to be tender and protective of their offspring, Bast also was regarded as a good mother, and she was sometimes depicted with numerous
kittens. Consequently, a woman who wanted children sometimes wore an amulet showing the goddess with kittens, the number of which indicated her own desired number of children.
Eventually, her position as patron and protector of Lower Egypt led to her being identified with the more substantial goddess
Mut, whose cult had risen to power with that of
Amun, and eventually being syncretized with her as Mut-Wadjet-Bast. Shortly after, in the constantly evolving pantheon, Mut also absorbed the identities of the Sekhmet-Nekhbet pairing as well.
This merging of identities of similar goddesses has led to considerable confusion, leading to some attributing to Bastet the title Mistress of the
Sistrum (more properly belonging to
Hathor, who had become thought of as an aspect of the later emerging
Isis, as had Mut), and the Greek idea of her as a lunar goddess (more properly an attribute of Mut) rather than the
solar deity she was. The native Egyptian rulers were replaced by Greeks during an occupation of Egypt that lasted almost five hundred years. These new rulers adopted many Egyptian beliefs and customs, but always "interpreted" them in relation to their Greek culture. These associations sought to link the antiquity of Egyptian culture to the newer Greek culture, thereby lending parallel roots and a sense of continuity. Indeed, much confusion occurred with subsequent generations; the identity of Bast slowly merged among the Greeks during their occupation of Egypt, who sometimes named her Ailuros (
Greek for cat), thinking of Bast as a version of
Artemis, their own moon goddess. Thus, to fit their own
cosmology, to the Greeks Bast is thought of as the sister of
Horus, whom they identified as
Apollo (Artemis' brother), and consequently, the daughter of the later emerging deities, Isis and
Ra. Roman occupation of Egypt followed in 30 BC, and their pantheon of deities also was identified with the Greek interpretations of the Ancient Egyptians. The introduction of Christianity and Muslim beliefs followed as well, and by the sixth century AD only a few vestiges of Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs remained, although the cult of Isis had spread to the ends of the Roman Empire.
