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Plate 1 A cat-headed goddess with large upright ears, holding a sistrum

Bastet

The cat goddess of Bubastis in the Nile Delta, drawn as a woman with a cat’s head holding a sistrum, often with a basket on her arm. Herodotus saw her festival there and wrote that the Egyptians took their dead cats to Bubastis to be embalmed and buried.

Egyptian gods and their symbols. Also called bast, bastet cat, bastet egyptian god, bastet symbol, bastet symbols, cat goddess, egyptian cat goddess, symbol of bastet.

Meaning

Bastet, written Bast by Budge and Erman, was the great goddess of the eastern Delta. Her city was Per-Bast, which the Greeks called Bubastis, and its ruins at Tell Basta were excavated by Naville. Erman describes her as cat-headed, “usually represented with the sistrum of the dancing women in her hand and a basket on her arm”, and calls her a counterpart of the joyous Hathor, “delighting in dancing and music”. Budge gives her a sistrum in the right hand and in the left an aegis, which Petrie describes as a deep collar of beadwork, usually topped by a lion’s head, that she carries by the menat attached to it. She could also have a lioness’s head: the Global Egyptian Museum explains that as the daughter of the sun god Re, joined with Tefnut and Sekhmet, she was drawn that way. Herodotus identified her with the Greek goddess Artemis. Budge connected her name with the Egyptian word for fire; the House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), which honours her today as Bast, reads it as “Devouring Lady”, from a word meaning to devour, and calls her “first and foremost a protectress”.

Origin and history

She is old. Pepi I, of the Sixth Dynasty, left his name at Bubastis, and in his funeral inscription the king’s heart is said to be “the heart of Bestet”, which Budge took as proof that her worship was already very old. Her great age came about 950 BC, when Sheshonq, a Libyan ruler whose capital was Bubastis, took power over Egypt; in consequence, Erman writes, “the cat-headed Bast, goddess of Bubastis, rose to be the official deity of the kingdom”.

Herodotus called her festival the principal and most enthusiastic in Egypt. People came by river, “a great number in every boat”, the women playing rattles and flutes and everyone singing and clapping; as each boat passed a town some women shouted mockery at the townswomen, danced or lifted their skirts. At Bubastis they made great sacrifices, “and more wine is drunk at this feast than in the whole year besides”, with seven hundred thousand people there, “as the people of the place say”. Erman gives the same 700,000; the old English translation Budge quoted has “7000 men and women, besides children”. Of her temple Herodotus wrote that others were greater and more costly “but none more pleasing to the eye than this”: it stood on an island between two channels of the Nile, left at its old level while the town around it was raised, so that it could be seen into from above, with a grove round the shrine that held her image. Budge adds that she was one of the goddesses of the birth chamber, with a special care for women who were with child.

Why is Bastet a cat?

The cat was her animal from the start. Budge wrote that in the earliest times she was worshipped as a cat, and that her lioness form probably came later. A cat lived in her temple, Erman notes, as a crocodile lived in Sobek’s, and Petrie lists the cat amulet simply as the “Emblem of the goddess Bastet”, very common on necklaces of the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynasties. Budge went further and tied the cat-headed Bastet to the moon, through Plutarch’s remark that cats’ pupils grow large at full moon; that is his theory. The House of Netjer, for its part, says her original image “did not include the ‘cat as sex symbol’ archetype”. The cat has its own page.

Cat mummies and Bubastis

Herodotus wrote that when a cat died, “Dead cats are taken away to sacred buildings in the town of Bubastis, where they are embalmed and buried”, and that a household where a cat died a natural death shaved their eyebrows in mourning. He also tells that in a house fire the Egyptians stood guard over the cats, “thinking more of the cats than of quenching the burning”. Museums hold the result. A painted wooden cat in the National Museum of Ireland is hollow, made to hold a cat mummy; the Global Egyptian Museum’s entry says that large numbers of cats were mummified and buried all over Egypt between 700 BC and AD 100, many of them as offerings to Bastet, as at Bubastis. Bubastis was not the only cat cemetery: the same museum describes a great temple and underground mausoleum for cats at Saqqara, the cemetery of Memphis, where worshippers put mummified cats in coffins and dedicated bronze figures of the cat.

Often confused with

Lioness-headed Sekhmet. Erman’s test is the attributes: Bastet carries the sistrum and the basket, and without them her cat’s head and Sekhmet’s lion’s head are hard to tell apart.

See also

Artemis, Sekhmet, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Set.

Sources

  1. The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, ch. XIV, pp. 444–449
  2. A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 13, 30, 166, 175, 180
  3. Herodotus, Histories 2.59, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 59
  4. Herodotus, Histories 2.60, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 60
  5. Herodotus, Histories 2.66, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 66
  6. Herodotus, Histories 2.67, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 67
  7. Herodotus, Histories 2.137, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 137
  8. Herodotus, Histories 2.138, Herodotus, The Histories, translated by A. D. Godley (Loeb Classical Library, 1920), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book 2, chapter 138
  9. Amulets, illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, W. M. Flinders Petrie, 1914, Constable and Company, London (Internet Archive), Nos. 194, 195, 224, 226
  10. Statue of The Cat Goddess Bastet (Global Egyptian Museum), Egyptian Museum, Cairo, SR 6916, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
  11. Coffin for a mummified cat (Global Egyptian Museum), National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, L1030:103, The Global Egyptian Museum, description
  12. Bast (Names of Netjer), House of Netjer, “Names of Netjer” glossary, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), Bast

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

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