The ancient Egyptians loved cats, and they gave the cat a goddess. Bastet (also Bast, Egyptian Bꜣstt) was usually shown as a woman with the head of a cat, holding a sistrum (a sacred rattle) and a small basket, with kittens at her feet — or simply as an elegant seated cat, wearing earrings and a collar. She was the protector of the home, of women in childbirth, of children, and of the joys of music, dance, and perfume. Her festival at Bubastis was, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, the largest and most riotous celebration in all Egypt.
Yet Bastet was not always gentle. In her earliest form she was a fierce lioness, a warrior goddess and a protector of the king, closely related to the terrifying lion goddess Sekhmet. Her transformation from lioness to house cat mirrors the history of the cat itself: from wild predator to beloved companion.
The Lioness
Bastet appears in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c. 2400 BCE) as a lion-headed goddess who nurses and protects the king. In the Middle Kingdom she remained a lioness, sometimes identified with the “Eye of Ra,” the sun god’s fierce avenging daughter who punished his enemies (see The Eye of Ra and the Destruction of Mankind).
Egyptian theology often described two sides of the same goddess: the raging, destructive lioness Sekhmet, “the powerful one,” associated with Upper Egypt, and the calmer Bastet, associated with Lower Egypt. A late text says: “She is raging like Sekhmet and friendly like Bastet.” Bastet was, in a sense, the pacified form of the goddess — the fury soothed.
The Cat
From about the first millennium BCE, and especially during the Twenty-Second Dynasty (c. 945–715 BCE), Bastet came to be depicted primarily as a domestic cat or a cat-headed woman. This dynasty was of Libyan origin and ruled from Bubastis in the eastern Nile Delta, Bastet’s home city, and under its kings her cult flourished as never before.
The cat was well suited to be a protective goddess. Egyptians had domesticated the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) by at least 2000 BCE, and probably much earlier. Cats protected the granaries from rats and mice, killed snakes and scorpions, and lived comfortably in homes. Mother cats were famously protective of their kittens. All these qualities became attributes of the goddess.
Protector of the Home
Bastet was a guardian against disease, evil spirits, and dangerous creatures. She protected women in pregnancy and childbirth, and small amulets of a cat with kittens were worn to promote fertility. She was associated with the sistrum, a rattle shaken in rituals to drive away evil and to please the gods, and with perfumes and ointments — her son was Nefertum, god of the lotus and of fragrance, in some traditions. (Some sources name Maahes, a lion god, as her son.)
In one myth, Bastet — as a cat — defends her father Ra by killing the chaos serpent Apophis with a knife. Famous vignettes in the Book of the Dead show a cat beneath a sacred persea tree, cutting off the head of a serpent (see Apophis: The Serpent of Chaos).
Bubastis
Bastet’s cult centre was Bubastis (Egyptian Per-Bastet, “House of Bastet”), modern Tell Basta, near Zagazig in the Nile Delta. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE, described its great temple as the most beautiful in Egypt. It stood on an island surrounded by two canals lined with trees, in the middle of the town, so that it could be seen from every side.
Herodotus also described the festival of Bastet, which drew 700,000 people by his count (not including children). Pilgrims travelled by boat down the Nile, men and women together. As they passed each town along the river, the women on board clapped, sang, played music, shouted jokes at the women on shore, danced, and lifted their skirts. At Bubastis they held great sacrifices, and “more wine is drunk at that festival than in all the rest of the year.”
The Cat Cemeteries
At Bubastis, and at other sites such as Saqqara and Beni Hasan, archaeologists have found vast cemeteries of mummified cats, buried as offerings to Bastet. Pilgrims would buy a mummified cat from temple workers and dedicate it to the goddess with a prayer.
The scale was enormous. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer at Beni Hasan discovered a cemetery containing an estimated 80,000 cat mummies. Most were shipped to England and ground up as fertilizer. One shipment alone weighed nineteen tons. A few specimens survive in museums.
Modern X-ray studies of cat mummies have revealed that many cats were young, killed deliberately at a few months old, specifically to be mummified as offerings. The temples apparently bred cats for this purpose — a grim contrast with the Egyptians’ reputation for loving their cats.
Cats in Egyptian Life
Herodotus reports that when a household cat died, the whole family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. Cats were buried with care, sometimes with bowls of milk and mummified mice. The historian Diodorus Siculus tells how a Roman soldier who accidentally killed a cat in Egypt around 60 BCE was lynched by a mob, despite the king’s attempts to save him, so great was the reverence for the animal. See Cats in Ancient Egypt: The Sacred Animals of Bastet.
Bastet in the Greek and Roman Periods
The Greeks identified Bastet with their goddess Artemis, the huntress and protector of women, and called Bubastis a city of Artemis. Her worship continued into the Roman period, and small bronze cat figurines were popular throughout the Mediterranean.
Bastet Today
Bastet is one of the most popular Egyptian deities today, especially among cat lovers. Elegant bronze statues of seated cats from the Late Period, such as the Gayer-Anderson Cat in the British Museum — with gold earrings, a nose ring, and a silver collar inscribed with the Eye of Horus — are among the most admired objects of Egyptian art. Bastet appears in novels, video games, and films, and in the popular imagination she has become a symbol of feminine grace, independence, and protective power — much like the cat itself.
Last reviewed: September 2026.