Bastet

Summary

Bastet is the goddess of Bubastis in the eastern Delta, on the Tanis branch of the Nile; the town's Egyptian name means "House of Bastet", and today it is Tell Basta. She began as a lioness: in the Old Kingdom she is nearly always shown lion-headed and is linked with two other lionesses, Sekhmet of Memphis and Tefnut of Heliopolis, so she entered the myths of the sun's Eye and was called daughter of Re and his Eye, the eye of the moon, and was finally equated with the cobra goddess Wadjet. In later periods the cat became her dominant image: many bronze statuettes with a cat's head, sometimes holding a sistrum as Hathor does, bronze cats dedicated to her, and thousands of cat mummies in cemeteries near her temples at Bubastis and Saqqara.

Her story is that of anger that calms. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow Re's Eye goes down as a lioness that kills people, then is made to drink red beer and comes back "the gracious one", as told on the Sekhmet and Hathor pages. Bastet is that second face: a text about Hathor of Dendera calls her "angry like Sakhmet, sweet like Bastet", setting the goddess's two faces in an angry lioness and a gentle cat. In the Pyramid Texts she is the king's mother who nurses him: "his mother Bastet has suckled him". She is mother of Mahes, the lion god, and in separate traditions of Nefertem or of Anubis. Though she became a cat, the lioness stayed in her: a text of Ramesses IV at Abydos says that hunting lions during the feast of Bastet was taboo.

Herodotus saw her festival in the fifth century BCE and calls it the greatest and most enthusiastically kept in Egypt. Men and women go by river together, many in every boat; some women make a noise with rattles, some play flutes, and the rest sing and clap. Whenever they pass a riverside town they bring the boat close to the bank; some women shout mockery at the women of the town, some dance, and some stand up and lift their skirts. At Bubastis they make great sacrifices, and "more wine is drunk at this feast than in the whole year besides"; the people of the place say seven hundred thousand men and women gather, not counting children. He describes her temple in the middle of the town: the town was raised around it while the temple stayed at its first level, so people look down into it; two channels from the Nile flow round it and make it an island, and a grove of tall trees surrounds the shrine that holds her image. Egyptians, he says, carry dead cats to sacred buildings at Bubastis to be embalmed and buried, and the people of a house where a cat has died shave their eyebrows. Excavation has shown that much of his account of the temple is accurate.

The idea Bastet's stories turn on is that the power that guards is the one that used to devour, once it has calmed. The lioness kills in the desert, the cat guards the house and the granary, and both are of one kind. That is why the Egyptian proverb in the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq says: "When a man smells of myrrh his wife is a cat before him. When a man is suffering his wife is a lioness before him." The one goddess is cat or lioness depending on who stands before her, and her festival of wine, song and dance is how anger is appeased, as Re's Eye was appeased with beer.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it Bꜣs.tjt: b, then a weak aleph, then s, then a feminine ending. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from bass and basbas, the sound used to call cats, says that bassat is literally the cat, and grades the reading "very likely". The Tāj al-ʿArūs gives al-bass as the domestic cat, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbād, adds that the common people say bissa with an i, the singular taking the feminine ending and the plural being bisās. Lisān al-ʿArab and other lexica give bas bas and bis bis as the sound by which sheep are called and a beast is driven, abassa bi-l-nāqa as calling a she-camel to be milked with a soft sound that calms her, and al-basūs as the she-camel that gives milk only when soothed with that sound. On this reading Bastet is al-bassa: the house cat, and the goddess whose anger has been soothed so that she yields good. That is what the story makes her: the lioness that has calmed.

Linguistic Root

Al-bassa

The Egyptian name has three letters before its ending: b, the weak sign ꜣ, and s. It ends in -tjt, the feminine of the nisba ending. The Egyptian dictionary files the name under the root bꜣs, which also gives a jar for ointment and bꜣs.t, a beaker or pail. In Egyptian itself, then, the name says "she of bꜣs". The Egyptian word for cat is something else: mjw for the tom and mjw.t for the she-cat, imitating the cat's cry.

The Egyptian essay reads the name twice. At first it offers b-s-t, which it glosses as gentleness, and b-ṣ-t, which it glosses as seeing, for the cat's piercing gaze, and grades the reading "medium". Later it returns and derives the name from bass and basbas, the call to a cat, saying "bassat is literally the cat", grades it "very likely", and calls it "a shared onomatopoeic word". That reading leads here.

The sounds: b is b, s is s, and the weak Egyptian aleph drops as hamza drops in speech. The t is the feminine ending in both languages; in Arabic it is the -a with which the dictionaries say the singular of bass is written. The sense: the Tāj gives al-bass as the domestic cat, and the Lisān and other lexica give bas bas as a call to sheep and a cry to drive a beast, and ibsās as the soft sound with which the herdsman calms the she-camel at milking. Lane does not give the cat under this root; for him bass is breaking and crumbling, as in the Qur'anic "and the mountains are crumbled to dust".

The reading is complete in letters, sense and story; its two open points, stated once here, are that the Egyptian dictionary ties the name to bꜣs and not to the cat, and that bass for the cat appears only in later lexicographers, so it is not known whether the Arabic word is older than the goddess's name or taken from it.

Key Mythic Narratives

Artemis of Bubastis

Herodotus calls Bastet "Artemis", and says that the Egyptians make Apollo and Artemis children of Dionysus and Isis, Dionysus being his name for Osiris, and that Leto was their nurse and keeper and hid Apollo on the floating island of Khemmis near Buto when Typhon came hunting for Osiris's son. "In Egyptian", he says, "Apollo is Horus, Demeter Isis, Artemis Bubastis." For the Egyptians who spoke to him Bastet was the sister of Horus. Herodotus 2.156, 2.144.

Bastet at the judgment

In the judgment chapter of the Book of Going Forth by Day the dead person stands before forty-two gods and declares his innocence to each: "O Bastet who comes from the shrine: I have not winked", and "O Wanderer who comes from Bubastis: I have not spied." Lichtheim II, pp. 126–127.

A house in Bubastis

In the Demotic tale of Setne Khamwas the king's son sees a beautiful woman named Tabubu at the temple of Ptah and is told she is the daughter of the prophet of Bastet, mistress of Ankhtawi. He sends for her, and she answers: "Come to Bubastis, to my house." He sails there and finds a lofty house in a garden. In that house Setne signs over to her all he owns and consents to the killing of his children; then he reaches for her, she cries out, and he wakes naked, to learn that Naneferkaptah worked it all on him by magic and that his children are alive.

The cat and the box

The Metropolitan Museum has a bronze box that once held a cat mummy; on its lid lies an alert cat, as if guarding what is beneath, with a necklace bearing an eye of Horus and a scarab on its head, and the donor's name on the box. The museum notes that such boxes were deposited in the cat catacombs at Bubastis and Saqqara with linen-wrapped cat mummies.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian rereading essay says that Egyptians used animal images as tools to explain the cosmos, and gives the cat as "night-time guarding". In a farmer's house the cat is what guards the granary from mice and snakes at night.

At Bastet's festival as Herodotus describes it, women go out in boats, play music, dance, mock the women of the towns they pass and bare their bodies, and more wine is drunk in a few days than in the rest of the year. The festival permits women what is not permitted the rest of the year, as at Hathor's feast of drunkenness, and as Hathor bared herself to her father Re when he sulked, so that he laughed and rose. The goddess honoured in this way is a goddess of the household, motherhood and fertility; the Metropolitan Museum calls her a powerful protective figure also known for her fertility, whose statuettes were among the most popular dedications of the Late Period.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Bastet is the calm face of Re's Eye, which nearly destroyed mankind and was made to drink and return, the story that places Sekhmet and Hathor among the flood and destruction stories: the angry goddess is appeased, not fought.

Herodotus calls her Artemis and makes her the daughter of Isis and Osiris and sister of Horus; for the Greeks Artemis is Leto's daughter and Apollo's sister, who protects childbirth and the young and hunts wild beasts. Ovid tells that when the gods fled from Typhoeus to Egypt they hid in animal forms: Apollo became a raven, his sister Diana a cat, Juno a white cow. So the Romans' Artemis hides in Egypt in the shape of Bastet's animal.