Cats in Ancient Egypt - Bubastis and The Cult of The Cat

Bubastis and The Cult of The Cat

Although the cat cult was a religious movement by the birth of the New Kingdom it gained importance when Shoshenq I developed Bubastis, chief centre of worship for the goddess Bast, located east of the Nile Delta, into an important city. At the same time, Bast developed into an immensely popular and important deity representing fertility, motherhood, protection, and the benevolent aspects of the sun - along with Sekhmet, she was known as the Eye of Ra. The cult of the cat garnered a huge following and thousands of pilgrims journeyed each year to Bubastis to celebrate. Bubastis also became another name by which the goddess was known.

Close to the centre of the city lay a large temple to Bast. This temple was in a depression which sited it at a lower elevation to the rest of the city, which had been raised to minimize flood damage from the nearby Nile. Of this Herodotus, who visited the city in 450 BC, wrote that although the size of the shrine to Bast was perhaps 'not as large as those of other cities, and probably not as costly, no temple in all of Egypt gave more pleasure to the eye'.

He went on to describe the temple in detail. A canal within this depression gave the temple the appearance of a man-made island. In the courtyard was a grove of trees leading the way to the interior, which contained a massive statue of Bast - and a great number of sacred cats, cared for by the temple priests with donations from pilgrims. The temple's cat population, while respected, was extremely large and needed to be moderated by the periodic sacrificial culling of kittens, which were then mummified and sold to pilgrims as relics.

Bubastis became a marketplace for merchants of all sorts; artisans came forth with thousands of bronze sculptures and amulets depicting cats to worshippers of Bast. These amulets commonly featured an image of a cat and its kittens and were often used by women trying to have children, praying to Bast that they be granted the same number of children as kittens depicted on the amulet.

Herodotus wrote that the annual festival of Bast held in the city was one of the most popular of all, with attendees from all over Egypt, who would raft down the Nile celebrating and feasting all the way. When they arrived in Bubastis, they feasted yet more and made sacrifices to Bast.

The famed revelling and commercialism of Bubastis even made its way into the Hebrew Bible. In the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel wrote that "The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword: and these cities shall go into captivity" (Ezekiel 30:17).

By 525 BC, Egypt was essentially the only empire not conquered by the Persians. At that point Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, set out to do just that. Cambyses and his army crossed the fifty-six mile stretch of desert to the Egyptian outpost of Pelesium on camelback; they then clashed down upon the Egyptian army who were reluctant to strike back at the sacred symbol of the cat upon the Persian shields.