Per-Bastet, known to the Greeks as Bubastis, and today called Tell Basta is situated at
the southeastern edge of the city of Zagazig, the capital of the Sharqiya Governorate.
In Egypt, Per means domain, so the city name means the Domain of Bastet.
It was the home of a cult dedicated to the cat goddess Bastet.
Technically the name Per-Bastet referred to the temple of the goddess, and the city just
took on the name of the temple.
Bastet’s cult may have originated in this very place.
She was depicted as a woman with a cat’s head.
Although there were several feline deities in Egypt, some of them lions, she was worshiped
in the form of the domesticated cat, and many mummified examples of cats have been found
buried here.
Bastet was not only the goddess of cats, but also the home, domesticity, fertility, childbirth,
and women’s secrets.
In other words, it was believed she protected the health of women and children by warding
off evil spirits and disease and ensured the safety of the home.
Sitting on the now dried-up Pelusiac branch
of the Nile, Per-Bastet was at the crossroads of two trade routes, one going into the Levant
and another going into Sinai, which made it an important economic and political center.
We have evidence of this city existing in Old Kingdom times.
There are the remains of Ka-temples built for Pepy I and Tety I of the 6th dynasty.
Large granite blocks carry the names of Khufu and Khafra, kings from the earlier 4th dynasty,
but we are not sure if these blocks came from
original buildings here or were brought here later.
There are cemeteries in the northwest area of the site that contain burials from the
Old Kingdom all the way to the Late Period.
In Pepy I’s temple, which is small but the parts of which are relatively complete, the
king is shown on the lintel of the gateway with Bastet in front of him giving him the
sign of life.
That indicates the goddess Bastet was probably the main divinity of the town even back then.
Recent excavations have found the remains of a provincial palace underneath Pepy’s
temple, which was used at least from the middle of the 4th dynasty to the end of the 5th.
It was leveled to make way for the new temple.
Many more blocks were found here from the time of the Middle Kingdom.
Amenemhat III of the 12th dynasty had a building here.
Due to its large size, around 16,000 square meters, it is believed that it was the residence
of king Amenemhat himself when he was in town or maybe of one of the important officials,
such as the mayor of the city or the governor of the province.
In the New Kingdom, Ramesses II added some
monuments, which he was prone to do practically everywhere.
It was not, however, until the 3rd Intermediate Period, when the Meshwesh Libyan dynasty arose,
that Per-Bastet rose to major city status.
The transformation of the town by the Meshwesh rulers (Meshwesh refers to an ancient Libyan
Berber tribe) was precipitated by events that occurred at the end of the New Kingdom, when
the Sea Peoples, migrants from the area of the Aegean Sea and Asia Minor, invaded the
western Delta with the aid of Libyan allies.
Ramesses III defeated them, and he placed the captured Libyans in military settlements
within Egyptian territory.
It seems Per-Bastet was one of these settlements.
Over time the Meshwesh Libyans grew in power in the city, and by the time of Pasibkhanu II,
the last king of the Twenty-First Dynasty, a fellow named Shoshenq, a resident of Per-Bastet,
rose to prominence.
The king had granted him military titles: ‘Great Chief of Chiefs’ and ‘Great Chief
of Ma’ (Ma is short for Meshwesh) and gave his daughter Maatkara in marriage to Shoshenq’s
son Osorkon.
After the death of Pasibkhanu II, and the collapse of the 21st dynasty, Shoshenq (whom
we call Shoshenq I) ascended to the throne, founding what we call the 22nd Dynasty.
The ancient Egyptian historian Manetho called this dynasty ‘Bubastite’ after the name
of their home city.
Under the Bubastite kings, this city and Tanis, which we will visit next, formed the heart
of their domain.
Osorkon I and II erected major structures here, enlarging the temple of Bastet and adding
temples to Atum and Mihos.
Despite its name, the famed Bubastite Portal was never here but in fact, can be found at
the Temple of Amun in Karnak in Upper Egypt.
It was indeed put there by the kings of this dynasty, but we won’t be able to see it
until we go to Karnak.
-We're here at this massive pink Granite statue of Queen Meritamen.
She was actually the daughter of king Ramses II and his wife, Nefertari, And after her
mother Queen Nefertiti's death, she actually became her father King Ramses II's great wife.
So this is the front.
You can see it's actually pretty intact.
There's a bit of damage on it.
She's holding the lotus flower.
It sort of curves.
Like, her arm’s like this.
And then, do you see the wings, the feathers framing her face?
This is such a beautiful statue.
It's actually a lot larger than I expected it to be.
I thought I could just sort of point at little details, but it is so huge and beautiful.
and we're just walking to the back right now where we'll see different hieroglyphic
inscriptions and I think there are three cartouches
on the back one of the cartouches at least
has has an inscription of the Goddess Ma'at which was the goddess of justice so that's
really interesting it's beautiful look at look at that over here
-This colossal pink granite statue weighs in at 80 tons.
Osorkon II liked it so much that he reinscribed the back of it with his own name, along with
that of his wife Karomama.
- They've got a shooting range over there. They're
practicing shooting. That's what you're hearing, those gunshots.
Archaeologists have continued to work at Tell Basta, and as they find new interesting objects,
they put them in the Open Air Museum.
Most of them are not yet labeled.
Recently, pieces of a royal colossal standing statue were found in the Festival Hall of
Osorkon II in the Temple of Bastet, which was temporarily placed off to the side.
-These are the parts of a statue, and you can notice here there are holes in them, right?
These are drill holes.
They used to use these tube drills to drill into the stone, and the purpose of them was
to attach the different parts of the statue.
So, you have the pieces of a statue here, and they would put dollies in there to hold
the statue together.
This whole statue is granite by the way: pink granite.
You can see the head of the king here.
There's his eye.
Over here, you can see the Cartouche of the King on his shoulder.
-What's that white thing?
-That?
I’ll just get that out of the way The archaeologists think it was originally
made by Senusret I in the Middle Kingdom then was usurped by Ramses II and erected in Memphis
and then was usurped by Osorkon II and brought here the inscriptions carry the names of both
Ramses and Osorkon.
-This here was once on top of this.
Isn't that cool?
Just imagine taking that and [mimes lifting] right on top.
Oh, this is cool. This is the cartouche of Ramses.
There were many kings of the 22nd and 23rd dynasties that carried the throne names Osorkon,
Shoshenq and Takeloth, which makes the history of the times difficult to unravel.
The numbering of these kings, and the Shoshenqs in particular are inconsistent, so it can
be confusing to the average person.
And we keep finding more people with those names.
For example, in the 90s, a piece of a limestone door lintel was discovered in the western
part of the central yard of the temple of Bastet, and it refers to a previously unknown
King Shoshenq, Shoshenq Tutkheperre, now numbered as Shoshenq IIb, who clearly built something here.
This motif here is very common in Egyptian pillars.
This is made out of beautiful pink granite, probably from Aswan, and this is the palm-designed
pillar top, and has a long history of usage in Egypt.
You will sometimes hear from proponents of lost ancient high technology that this
is somehow thousands and thousands of years older than what it actually is,
but if you know the history of pillar construction in Egypt, this is very, very common.
There are more than 30 different column designs
from ancient Egypt, but I will give you the basics.
The capitals on the columns usually have a plant theme.
There is the palm design, as you see here, a palmette design, a papyrus design, symbolic
of Lower Egypt, with open or closed buds, and a lotus design, symbolic of Upper Egypt.
There also is a goddess Hathor design.
Columns were made of different types of stone,
depending on how much they wanted to spend on them.
In early times, it was common to have one large monolithic block as a column, but in
later times, they found it was easier and more efficient to use sectional blocks.
They would then smooth them.
Columns were painted, so it hid the section divisions anyway.
As they got better at building, the Egyptians were able to space their columns further apart.
-We are here looking at the ruins of the Temple of Bastet itself.
You can kind of get an idea for its size when it was new, but all that's left, of course,
are a bunch of toppled stones.
The temple of Bastet was once the jewel of the city.
It was relatively modest in size at first,
but during the 22nd Dynasty, it began to be expanded.
Osorkon I made additions, but the most significant work was done by Osorkon II.
This colonnade leads to a hypostyle hall built by him, which featured papyrus and Hathor columns.
-Okay, as you can see along here, you have all the pillars going down the entrance hall
of the temple, and these pillars are a different style than what we saw over there.
These features, like you can see over on the
far one over there, that's the Papyrus pillar top, right?
Another style where the Papyrus is closed, that refers to nighttime.
When it is open, that's during the daytime.
The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BCE, speaks of an annual
festival held at Bubastis in honor of Bastet (whom he calls Artemis, the Greek equivalent).
“Of the towns in Egypt that were raised, in my opinion, Bubastis is especially prominent,
where there is also a temple of Bubastis, a building most worthy of note.
Other temples are greater and more costly, but none more pleasing to the eye than this.
Bubastis is, in the Greek language, Artemis.
When the people are on their way to Bubastis, they go by river, a great number in every
boat, men and women together.” (he found this unusual) “Some of the women make a
noise with rattles, others play flutes all the way, while the rest of the women, and
the men, sing and clap their hands.
As they travel by river to Bubastis, whenever they come near any other town they bring their
boat near the bank; then some of the women do as I have said, while some shout mockery
of the women of the town; others dance, and others stand up and lift their skirts.
They do this whenever they come alongside any riverside town.
But when they have reached Bubastis, they make a festival with great sacrifices, and
more wine is drunk at this feast than in the whole year besides.
It is customary for men and women (but not children) to assemble there to the number
of seven hundred thousand, as the people of the place say”
The river he refers to is the now-dried up Pelusiac branch of the Nile.
Yet he seems to imply that the water brought them right up to where the temple was.
Interestingly, recent geoarchaeological surveys have revealed that there were two sacred canals
north and south of the Temple of Bastet.
In Egypt sacred canals and lakes (called isheru) were common features of temples, especially
for fierce cat goddesses, whose temperaments could be calmed by the cool waters.
Later on, in the final native Egyptian dynasty, Dynasty 30, the kings Nekhtnebef I and Nekhthorheb
II engaged in further construction here, refurbishing
and adding to the great temple of Bastet.
In the Greco-Roman period, the town went into decline, and by the time of the Arab invasion,
Per-Bastet had been reduced to ruins and was being used as a quarry.