The cat in ancient Egypt and the goddess Bastet of Bubastis

Few animals enjoyed in antiquity a prestige comparable to that of the cat in Egypt. It probably entered farmers' homes as a hunter of mice and snakes around the granaries, and over time the feline became the image of a deity, the focus of crowded festivals and the protagonist of vast animal cemeteries. Following its story means crossing almost three thousand years of Egyptian religion, from the first domestic depictions to the accounts of Greek and Roman authors.

From lioness to cat

Bastet already appears in the Old Kingdom, but in her earliest images she looks like a lioness or a lion-headed woman, very close to the fearsome Sekhmet. Only in the first millennium BC did the form of the cat prevail, or of a cat-headed woman holding a sistrum and a small basket. Egyptian theologians tended to see the two goddesses as two faces of the same power: destructive fury on one side, domestic protection on the other.

The cat also had a cosmic role. In some funerary texts, including chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, the sun god takes the form of a great cat who, beside the sacred tree of Heliopolis, slays the serpent of chaos. Bastet herself was called the daughter of Ra and was sometimes associated with his eye, that is, with the watchful power that drives away the enemies of the sun.

Bubastis and the festival described by Herodotus

The centre of the cult was Bubastis, today Tell Basta, in the eastern Delta, whose Egyptian name Per-Bastet means «house of Bastet». The city reached the height of its importance under the Twenty-second Dynasty, of Libyan origin, which had its residence there. Of the great temple there remain blocks of red granite and foundations, excavated at the end of the nineteenth century by the Swiss scholar Édouard Naville.

In the fifth century BC Herodotus, in the second book of his Histories, described the festival of Bubastis as one of the most popular in Egypt: men and women arrived by boat along the Nile, amid singing, music and great quantities of wine. The Greek historian, who identified Bastet with Artemis, also reports that in households struck by the death of a cat, the members of the family shaved their eyebrows as a sign of mourning.

Mummies, amulets and unwritten laws

Popular devotion was expressed above all through votive offerings. In the cemeteries of Bubastis, Saqqara and Beni Hasan mummified cats have been found in enormous numbers, often wrapped in bandages arranged in geometric patterns and sometimes enclosed in wooden or bronze coffins. Radiological studies have shown that many of the animals were young, which suggests breeding linked to the temples, intended to supply offerings for pilgrims.

Diodorus Siculus, who visited Egypt in the first century BC, says he saw a crowd lynch a Roman who had killed a cat by accident, despite the intervention of the king's officials. The episode, perhaps exaggerated, shows how deeply rooted respect for the animal was. Amulets in the shape of a female cat, often with her kittens, accompanied daily life instead, as signs of protection for the home and for motherhood.

The modern fate of the feline mummies shows how far that sensibility had been lost: at the end of the nineteenth century thousands of specimens from Beni Hasan were shipped to England and sold as fertiliser. What survives in museums, from the bronze statuettes of the Late Period to the small painted coffins, still allows us to grasp the Egyptian idea of the cat as a domestic presence and at the same time a reflection of a divine order.