Bastet did not start as a cat. In the Old Kingdom she is a lioness — the Pyramid Texts mention her, and her early iconography is indistinguishable in kind from the other dangerous solar lionesses of the Egyptian pantheon. The domestic cat form that everyone now pictures emerges much later, becoming standard during the first millennium BCE, and it coincides with a general softening of her character. She is one of the clearest cases in Egyptian religion of a deity whose nature visibly changes over time, and the change can be dated by the images.
The name is written with the bas jar, an alabaster ointment vessel, plus the feminine ending, and older English writing calls her Bast; the fuller form Bastet reflects the later Egyptian spelling and is now the usual convention.
Bubastis
Her city is Per-Bastet, "house of Bastet", which the Greeks rendered Bubastis and which lies in the eastern Delta near modern Zagazig. Herodotus visited in the fifth century BCE and devoted an admiring passage of Book 2 of the Histories to it: a temple on an island of water surrounded by the city, which had been raised around it so that one looked down into the sanctuary from every side, a grove of tall trees, and a red granite enclosure.
His description of the festival is the reason he gets quoted so often. Pilgrims travelled by barge in mixed crowds, playing pipes and castanets, singing and clapping; women shouted mockery at the people on the banks as they passed, and some pulled up their clothing at them. He puts the attendance at seven hundred thousand adults and says more wine was consumed at that festival than in the whole of the rest of the year. Herodotus is not a neutral witness — his Egyptian numbers are unreliable, he did not read Egyptian, and he liked a striking scene — but the general picture of a raucous, drunken, sexually charged river festival is consistent with what Egyptian sources say about the festivals of the pacified goddess elsewhere, so the shape is credible even where the figures are not.
Bubastis had a political moment too: the Twenty-second Dynasty, Libyan in origin, made it a royal residence, and Bastet's national profile rose with the dynasty that favoured her.
The cat cemeteries
Excavation at Bubastis, at Saqqara and at Beni Hasan has produced mummified cats in quantities that are difficult to convey. The Beni Hasan finds in the late nineteenth century were so vast that shipments were sold as fertiliser in England — an episode that destroyed an unknown amount of evidence before anyone thought to study it.
These were votive offerings: a pilgrim paid for a cat to be mummified and dedicated as a petition to the goddess. Radiography and CT work on surviving bundles has established that a high proportion are young animals, many killed by a broken neck, which points to breeding for the purpose at temple facilities. The industry was real, organised and, by any modern standard, unpleasant. It also tells you the cult reached far down the social scale, because votive mummies were an affordable devotional purchase in a way that a decorated tomb never was.
The related and separate fact — that Egyptians kept cats as household animals, valued them for controlling rodents and snakes, mourned them, and sometimes buried them individually with care — is well attested and should not be collapsed into the votive industry. Herodotus's story that families shaved their eyebrows when a house cat died is his, not Egypt's.
What she actually protected
Her domain is the house and the people in it. She appears on amulets, on cosmetic objects and on the aegis — a broad collar surmounted by her head — and her bronze figures typically show a seated cat, alert, often with kittens at her feet, sometimes wearing earrings. She carries a sistrum, the rattle of Hathor's cult, marking her among the goddesses appeased by music.
She is called a daughter of Ra and identified with the Eye of Ra, the role shared with Sekhmet, Tefnut and Wadjet. In that capacity she keeps a distinctly feline duty. The funerary papyri illustrate a great tomcat of Heliopolis putting a blade through the coils of Apep beneath a persea tree — an ordinary domestic sight, a cat killing a snake in the yard, elevated to the defence of the universe.
Late Egyptian and Greco-Roman sources set her against Sekhmet as a complementary pair, Lower Egypt's gentler cat against Upper Egypt's lioness. Since both began as lionesses, this contrast is the product of Bastet's own drift, not an original division.
Greeks, Romans and the twentieth century
The Greeks equated her with Artemis, chiefly on the strength of a Late Period myth in which the gods fled to Egypt in animal forms and Artemis took the shape of a cat. It is a weak equation — the huntress and the hearth-cat share very little — and it is a good example of interpretatio graeca forcing a match rather than finding one.
Modern reception has been unusually kind to her, and unusually inaccurate. She is now the internet's favourite Egyptian deity, the patron of a general sense that ancient Egypt worshipped cats, which it did not: Egypt honoured a goddess who took a cat's form, along with gods who took the forms of ibises, crocodiles, rams, falcons, beetles and hippopotami, and the theology in each case is about what the animal does. She appears in games, in tattoo design and in a great deal of contemporary neopagan practice, generally shorn of the lioness, the Eye of Ra and the cemetery at Beni Hasan.
Cat questions, answered carefully
Was killing a cat really a capital offence?
The claim comes from Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, who reports witnessing a Roman in Egypt lynched by a crowd for killing a cat, at a moment when Rome and Egypt were on delicate terms and the authorities could not save him. That is a first-hand account of a mob, not evidence of a statute, and no Egyptian legal text prescribing a penalty survives. What is well attested is that harming a sacred animal was a serious religious offence and could be prosecuted; the tidy "death penalty for killing a cat" formula outruns the sources.
Is Bastet connected to the word "puss" or to any English cat word?
No. That etymology circulates online and has no support; the English words have ordinary Germanic and imitative origins. Her name relates to the ointment jar sign and, by a widely repeated but uncertain reading, to a word for the perfumed unguent itself.
Why does she sometimes have a lioness head in late images?
Because the lioness never fully disappeared. Late Period bronzes show both, and some figures are deliberately ambiguous, particularly where the goddess is invoked in her protective and aggressive capacity rather than her domestic one. Egyptian artists were entirely comfortable switching a deity's animal to signal which aspect was wanted, and the Egyptian tradition hub has more on reading that visual grammar.