Here Kitty Kitty...

A lovely find.

Egyptian archeologists have uncovered what they believe is the 2,200-year-old temple dedicated to the ancient cat god Bastet (Alexandria).

Bastet started out as a lion-headed goddess, but as time went along became more diminutive as contacts with other civilizations, such as the Greeks, affected the local religion.

Wikipedia says::: In the temple at Per-Bast some cats were found to have been buried and mummified next to their owners. More than 300,000 mummified cats were discovered when Bast's temple at Per-Bast was excavated. The main source of information about the Bastet cult comes from Herodotus who visited Bubastis around 450 BC during the heyday of the cult. He equated Bastet with the Greek Goddess Artemis. He wrote extensively about the cult. Turner and Bateson suggest that the status of the cat was roughly equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might leave a family in great mourning and those who could would have them embalmed or buried in cat cemeteries - pointing to the great prevalence of the cult of Bastet. Great find of cat remains were found not only at Bubastis, but also at Beni Hasan and Saqqara. In 1888 in Beni Hasan a farmer uncovered a plot of many hundreds of thousands of cats.

The head of the excavation team, Mohammed Abdel-Maqsood is reported by the UK.Guardian to have said, the discovery may be the first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria's royal quarter.

The large number of statues depicting Bastet found in the ruins, he said, suggested that this may be the first Ptolemaic-era temple dedicated to the cat god to be discovered in Alexandria. This would indicate that the worship of the ancient Egyptian cat-god continued during the later, Greek-influenced, Ptolemaic period

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