WORSHIP
AND MUMMIFICATION
Bastet -
or Bast - is just one of many ancient Egyptian cat deities. Why were cats so important to the Egyptians? Cats
preyed upon the rodents that would have destroyed stored grain. Without the rodent population kept in check, the people
would have starved in times of crop failure. Cats also hunted the numerous poisonous arachnids and snakes of the area,
so they were considered protectors of the households.
One
of the largest and most famous temple for Bast was at Bubastis. Bubastis was a marketplace for merchants of all
sorts; artisans came forth with thousands of bronze cat
sculptures and amulets.
These amulets usually featured an image of a cat and its kittens. Women seeking fertility prayed to Bast
that they be blessed with the same number of children as kittens depicted on the amulet.
The
Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the annual festival of Bast held in the city was extremely popular, with attendees from
all over Egypt. Devotees rafted down the Nile celebrating and feasting all the way. When they arrived in Bubastis, they
feasted yet more and made sacrifices to Bast.
Herodotus
noted that cats that died anywhere in Egypt were often taken to Bubastis to be mummified and buried in the great cemetery.
In actuality, there were several sites. In Bubastis , more than 720 cubic feet of cat remains were discovered, but also a great deal of evidence
of cremation.
Swiss Egyptologist
Édouard Naville found stacks of cat bones in many pits,
the walls of which were made up of bricks and clay. Near each pit lay a furnace, its bricks blackened from fire. This discovery
causes some problems. The mummification and preservation of the body was intended to make it possible for the deceased's ka
to locate its host and subsequently be reborn into the afterlife. Cremation would rule out this possibility because the body would no longer
be intact. Still, many cats received the full embalming ceremony and were interred in other great cemeteries
along the Nile. The cat mummies were also left with pots of milk and mummified mice to enjoy in the afterlife.
However,
not all the cats honored with mummification were pampered temple dwellers. From
about 332 B.C. to 30 B.C., the priests started turning a profit with the popularity of Bast. Cats were raised for the
specific purpose of being turned into mummies! These mummies were sold to people on their way to worship Bast and left
at the temple as offerings. Not only that, these mummied cats did not die of natural causes: X-rays
show that the cats were often killed by having their necks broken. The bodies were then dried out using Natron salt, a
process similar to that used for human mummification.
The cats - often kittens
age two to six months old - were then elaborately wrapped with the forelegs lying down the front and the hind legs drawn
up beside the pelvis. Cat faces and decorative designs were drawn on the wrappings with black ink. Two-
to four-month-old kittens especially were sacrificed in huge numbers. So many cat mummies were made that researchers
can only guess that there were millions of them.
The priests made lots of money selling these cat
mummies, but they also cheated the public as well. Some mummies contained only a few scattered bones. Some others
actually had nothing inside but stuffing!
This evidence of cat sacrifice was quite a shock
when it had been already well documented how venerated cats were in ancient Egypt. Owners of departed felines would
shave their eyebrows in mourning. It was said that killing a cat - even accidently - was punishable by death. At the
battle of Pelusium in 525 BCE, the Egyptian army defeated by the Persian general Cambysus II because the invaders
carried live cats (and other sacred animals) before them or else had cat images on their shields. Still, both the words sacred
and sacrifice are very much interwined. The root word comes from the Latin word sacrum which refers to anything
holy or of the gods. Sacrificium translates as to make sacred. Perhaps the price of being associated with
Bastet made some cats the most acceptable sacrifices. When the priests killed the kittens ritually, they were socially exempt
from wrong doing.
.A colossal tomb honoring the feline dead at the temple of Bast was discovered
in 1888. This tomb, outside of Beni
Hasan,
held over 19 tonnes of animal mummies and remains, the vast majority - over 300,000 individuals -being
cats. With the cats, mummified mongooses, dogs, and foxes were amongst the specimens
that made it to the British
Museum.
The farmer who made the discovery sold most of the tomb's contents to be ground up as fertilizer! Fortunately, a number
of specimens were saved by scientists for testing and examination. Today, some of these animal mummies are on display
at the British Museum.
