Bastet and Connection to Other Deities

The lioness represented the war goddess and shielder of both lands that would link as Ancient Egypt. As divine mother, and more particularly as protector, for Lower Egypt, Bast became strongly associated with Wadjet, the patron goddess of Lower Egypt. She eventually became Wadjet-Bast, paralleling the akin pair of patron (Nekhbet)  and  lioness  shielder  (Sekhmet) for Upper Egypt. Bast fought an evil snake described Apep. As the strong lion god Maahes of warm Nubia later became part of Egyptian mythology and put the role of the son of Bast, during the time of the New Kingdom, Bast  was  held to  be  the  daughter  of Amun Ra, a new up deity in the  Egyptian  pantheon  through that late dynasty. Bast become identified as his mother in the Lower Egypt,  near  the  delta.  Similarly  the  severe  lioness  war  goddess Sekhmet,  became  discovered  as  the  mother  of  Maashes  in  the  Upper Egypt.

Wadjet-Bastet (lioness head, solar disk, and the snake cobra)
Cats in ancient Egypt were feared highly, partly due to their ability to combat vermin such as mice, shops - which unsafe key food supplies,  and  snakes,  peculiarly  cobras.  Cats  of  royalty  were,  in  some exemplifies, known to be dressed in golden jewelry and were left to eat from their owners' scales. Turner and Bateson estimate that during the twenty-second dynasty (945-715 B.C), Bast worship modified from being a lioness deity into being a star cat deity. With the union of the two Egypts, many similar deities were agreed into one or the other, the import of Bast and Sekhmet, to the sectional cultures that merged, resulted in a retention of both, necessitating a change to one or the other.

The Ancient Egyptian pantheon was producing constantly. Through the 18th dynasty Thebes got the capital of  Ancient  Egypt  and  because  of  that,  their sponsor deity became  sovereign.The priests of the temple of Amun exchanged the relative height of other  deities  in  the  Egyptian pantheon. Decreasing  the  status  of  Bast,  they  leaded off relating to  her with  the  summed  post-fix, as "Bastet"  and  their  exercise  of  the  new  name  became  very  familiar  to Egyptologists. In the temple at Per-Bast some cats were discovered to have been mummified and buried, many beside their proprietors. More  300000  mummified  cats  were  discovered  when  Bast's  temple  at  Per-Bast  was  dug.  The  main source of data about the Bast cult comes from Herodotus who seen Bubastis some 450 BC during afterwards the modifications in the cult. He compared Bastet with the Greek Goddess Artemis. He saved extensively about the cult. Turner and Bateson indicate that the status of the cat was rough equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might lead a family in great mourning and those who forced out would have them embalmed or forgot in cat cemeteries - indicating to the great prevalence of the cult of Bastet. Extensive sepultures of cat continues were found not only at Bubastis, but likewise at Beni Hasan (El_Minya) and  Saqqara. In 1888, a granger naked a plot of many hundreds  of thousands of cats in Beni Hasan.

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