Cat

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bastet was a powerful goddess of Lower Egypt, one who was protective and could bring about great prosperity. In zoomorphic form, she was represented as a cat and cats were considered sacred to her. This cat sits on a menat-shaped base in a typical pose, upright with its tail wrapped along its right side. It is poised and alert, on guard against external forces. This small figure is exceptional because of the level of detail and attention that went into its manufacture. It has many of the same features as other seated cats: it wears an amulet, its fur is indicated by short repeated markings, and it has a ringed tail. On this example, however, these features are picked out in gold, which gives it a striking appearance. This piece also gives us insight into the mentality of those who dedicated such objects; it shows that even small statuettes were considered important and worthy of elaboration and extra cost. Dedications did not always have to be large to be significant or impressive. Cat statuettes were among some of the most common zoomorphic dedications of the Late and Ptolemaic Periods. Small statuettes like this one would have been dedicated as offerings to temples or deposited in catacombs alongside cat mummies, as at the extensive catacombs at Bubastis and Saqqara. Sometimes larger hollow examples held a cat mummy inside.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 30,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from about 300,000 BCE to the 4th century CE. A signifcant percentage of the collection is derived from the Museum's three decades of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.

Metropolitan Museum of Art