Bastet and her forms
The British Museum identifies the Gayer-Anderson Cat as a bronze feline figure from the Late Period of Egypt, dating to around 600 BC. C., and relates its shape to Bastet.1
The form of a divinity does not turn each represented cat into an individual biography or a contemporary emblem without nuances.1
Cats in homes and barns
Files from the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art document cat-shaped objects; they alone do not provide a count of cats in homes, barns, or cities.12
Between the preserved object and everyday life there is a distance that should be mentioned before imagining a complete domestic scene.2
Objects and worship
The Gayer-Anderson Cat belongs to the British Museum and its file dates it to the Late Period; The Met file classifies another feline representation between the Late and Ptolemaic Periods.12
Institutional attributions allow us to locate what object is being looked at, what period it comes from and what museum interpretation accompanies it.12
Mummies and offerings
The two tokens gathered here are evidence of concrete objects and representations; they are not enough to quantify mummies or offerings from all of Egypt on their own.12
A brief bibliography can open a question about ritual uses without pretending that it has exhausted the archeology of offerings.1
What “sacred” does not mean
None of these pieces allow us to conclude that all cats were sacred or that they all received the same treatment in ancient Egypt.12
Uncertainty does not diminish Bastet's interest: it forces us to separate a documented religious representation from a generalization about all animals.1