134 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniahas the head of a lion, sometimes of a cat. At Philæ it is said of
her that“she is savage as Sekhet and mild as Bast.”^116 But the
lion must have preceded the cat. The earlier inhabitants of the
valley of the Nile were acquainted with the lion; the cat seems
to have been introduced from Nubia in the age of the Eleventh
Dynasty. In the time of the Old Empire there was no cat-headed
deity, for there were no cats. But the cat, when once introduced,
was from the outset a sacred animal.^117 The lion of Sekhet was
transformed into a cat; and as the centuries passed, the petted and
domesticated animal was the object of a worship that became
fanatical. Herodotos maintains that when a house took fire the
Egyptians of his time thought only of preserving the cats; and
[145] to this day the cat is honoured above all other animals on the
banks of the Nile. The chief sanctuary of Bast was at Bubastis,
where, however, the excavations of Dr. Naville have shown
that she did not become the chief divinity before the rise of the
Twenty-second Dynasty.^118
The goddesses passed one into the other even more readily
than the gods. Sekhet developed by turns into Uazit and Mut,
Selk the scorpion, and Hathor of Dendera. Pepi I., even at
Bubastis, still calls himself the son of Hathor.
Hathor played much the same part among the goddesses that
Ra played among the gods. She gradually absorbed the other
female divinities of Egypt. They were resolved into forms of
(^116) In the Speos Artermidos near Beni-Hassan, where a large cemetery of
mummified cats has been found, she is called Pakht, an older form of Bast.
(^117) On a slab discovered by Professor Petrie at Koptos, UsertesenI.{FNSof the
Twelfth Dynasty already appears standing before a cat-headed goddess who
is called“Bast, the lady of Shel.”Shel is perhaps Ashel at Karnak, where the
temple of Mut stood, in which so many figures of Bast or Sekhet have been
found (Petrie,Koptos, pl. x. 2). The name of Bast also occurs in the Pyramid
texts (Pepi290); but here it is an epithet of Uazit, the goddess of Dep or Buto,
once the capital of the kingdom of Northern Egypt, who is contrasted with the
goddess of Nekheb.
(^118) Naville,Bubastis(Egypt Exploration Fund), i. pp. 44, 47, 48.