BRONZE CAT OF THE SAÏTE PERIOD.
Barrère Collection.
She is Bastît, a goddess of good family, the worship of whom flourished especially in the east of the delta, and she is very often drawn or named on the monuments, although they do not tell us enough of her myths or her origin. She was allied or related to the Sun, and was now said to be his sister or wife, now his daughter. She sometimes filled a beneficent and gracious rôle, protecting men against contagious diseases or evil spirits, keeping them off by the music of her sistrum: she had also her hours of treacherous perversity, during which she played with her victim as with a mouse, before finishing him off with a blow of her claws. She dwelt by preference in the city that bore her name, Poubastît, the Bubastis of classical writers. Her temple, at which Cheops and Chephrên had worked while they were building their pyramids, was rebuilt by the Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, enlarged by those of the XXVIth; when Herodotus visited it in the middle of the fifth century B.C., he considered it one of the most remarkable he had seen in the parts of Egypt through which he had travelled. It stood in the centre of the city, at the end of the market-place. It was bordered by two canals, each 100 feet wide and shaded by trees; they flowed without joining, one on the right, the other on the left of the building, almost making it an artificial island. Travellers before entering it looked over the enclosure, even into the exterior court-yards, for Bubastis had undergone the fate of many of the large cities of Egypt; in the course of ages the ground became raised in such a way that the foundations of recent houses were on a higher level than those of the temple. A big wall, decorated with pictures like the outer wall of the temple of Edfou, enclosed the temenos. The fêtes of Bastît attracted pilgrims from all parts of Egypt, as at the present day those of Sidi Ahmed el-Bedaouî draw people to the modern fair of Tantah. The people of each village crowded into large boats to get there, men and women pell-mell, with the fixed intention of enjoying themselves on the journey, a thing they never failed to do. They accompanied the slow progress of navigation with endless songs, love songs rather than sacred hymns, and there were always to be found among them flute players and castanet players to support or keep time to the voices. Whenever they passed by a town, they approached the bank as near as they could without landing, and then, while the orchestra redoubled its noise, the passengers threw volleys of insults and coarse remarks at the women standing on the bank; they retorted, and when they had exhausted words, they pulled up their petticoats and behaved indecently by way of reply. Herodotus was told that 700,000 persons, equal numbers of men and women, not reckoning little children, went thus every year to Bubastis. Entry into the temple did not calm them, far from it. They sacrificed a great number of victims with a sincere and joyous piety; then they drank deeply from morning to evening, and from evening to morning, as long as the festival lasted: more wine was consumed in a few days than in all the rest of the year put together.
The greater number of the pilgrims, before returning home, left a souvenir of their visit at the feet of Bastît. It was a votive stele with a fine inscription, and a picture showing the donor worshipping his goddess; or a statuette in blue or green pottery, or if they were wealthy, in bronze, silver, or sometimes gold: the goddess would be standing, seated, crouching with a woman’s body and a cat’s head, a sistrum or an ægis in her hand. During the Greek period the figures were in bronze or in painted and gilded wood surmounted by a cat’s head in bronze. Many were life-size and modelled with elaborate art; they had eyes of enamel, a gilded necklace round the neck, earrings, and amulets on the forehead. It sometimes happened that when a cat he particularly venerated died in his house, the pilgrim embalmed it according to the rites: he took the mummy with him, and, arrived at Bubastis, shut it up in one of the figures he offered. These various objects, at first placed anywhere in the temple, would quickly have filled it, if some remedy had not been found. They were piled up provisionally at the end of one of the secondary chambers, then thrown outside, and there encountered diverse fortunes. I do not think I am calumniating the Egyptian priests in saying that it must have been a great grief to them to part with so many precious gifts without trying to derive some honest profit from them. The gold and silver figures did not endure; they quickly went into the melting-pot, and few emerge from the ruins, but the bronze and copper were so abundant that there would have been little to gain in melting down the cats. So they sorted out the heap of bronzes, and while they kept some, the finest, doubtless, or those that bore inscriptions, they sold the rest to new generations of pilgrims, who, in their turn, offered them in due form. However frequently this was done, the influx was considerable, and they were forced to rid themselves quickly of the pieces that had at first been kept in reserve. They shut them up in cellars, or in pits dug expressly for them, veritable favissæ similar to those of classical times;[93] they accumulated by thousands, large and small, in wood and in bronze, some intact and fresh as when just made, others already out of shape, rotten, oxidized and of no value. The places of concealment were soon forgotten, and the stuff in them reposed there beyond the reach of men until the day when the chances of excavation brought it to light.
One of them restored M. Barrère’s cat. It is not possible to determine the period at which it was buried: the persons who found it were seekers of nitreous manure, or dealers in antiquities who took good care not to divulge the circumstances and the site of their discovery. But judging from the roundness of certain forms and the aspect of the bronze, we recognize the style of the second Saïte Period, and the piece is to be attributed either to the Nectanebos, or the first Ptolemies, in a general way to the fourth century B.C. or the beginning of the third century B.C. It was the time when the worship of Bastît and her subordinate forms, Pakhît, Maît, was most popular, the period when, near Speos-Artemidos, the most extensive cemetery of cats in Egypt was established. The execution is pure Egyptian, and in no way betrays any Greek influence.
XXV
A FIND OF CATS IN EGYPT[94]
It was announced in the English newspapers, and the French followed suit, that a ship had recently reached London and disembarked 180,000 mummies of Egyptian cats. For a long time manufacturers of different nationalities have been accustomed to seek out the burying grounds of animals throughout Egypt, and to export the bones to Europe, where they are used as manure. A few years ago a necropolis full of monkeys was sent to Germany to manure beet-root fields. It seems that the cats of this year were discovered near Beni-Hassan; they were piled up at hazard in a sort of cavern, into which a fellah in search of antiquities was the first to penetrate. In fact, at some distance to the south of the hypogeums of Beni-Hassan, in the place called by geographers Speos-Artemidos, is a chapel hollowed out in the rock, and consecrated by the kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties to a local goddess, a woman’s body with a cat’s or lion’s head, called Pakhît. The depôt recently exploited was found there, and the cats which reposed in it must have lived in the vicinity, under the protection of their cousin, the goddess. Cemeteries of the same kind existed wherever a divinity of a feline type was worshipped, lion, tiger, or cat. The most celebrated was at Bubastis, in the delta, where the seekers of antiquities cleared away the rubbish about thirty-seven years ago.[95] The mummies of cats were buried there in favissæ, deep pits, some merely wrapped in swathings, others enclosed in little coffins reproducing the image of the animal. Some of these coffins are entirely of wood covered with white stucco, gilded, painted in bright colours; some are in bronze, others have the body in wood and the head in bronze, with gold rings in their ears and encrustations of gold on the forehead and in the eyes. Statuettes of cats of different sizes, portraits of the goddess Bastît with a cat’s head, or of the god Nofirtoumou, are mingled with the mummies. Thence come the thousands of bronze cats, big and little, with which all the antiquaries of Europe and Cairo were so abundantly provided from 1876 to 1888. The important cat illustrated here, and who lives now in one of the glass cases in the “Salle divine” of the Louvre, is a perfect type of the species, long, slender in the back, broad in the hind-quarters, with a delicate, well-set head, rings in the ears, a necklace round the neck, and a little scarab on the top of the head; the artist who modelled it has rendered excellently and truthfully the supple bearing and the bold physiognomy of his original.
BRONZE CAT.
The Louvre.