LOT 0060

'The Fitzgerald' Egyptian Bronze Statue of the Seated Cat Goddess Bastet

LATE PERIOD, 26TH-30TH DYNASTY, CIRCA 664-332 B.C.

4 3/8 in. (470 grams total including stand, cat: 11.2 cm high).

Modelled seated, its tail wrapped around one side of its body and resting on a front paw, both ears pierced, wearing a collar featuring a large amuletic pendant, a rectangular tang for attachment to a separate element below; mounted on a 1970s custom-made perspex display stand. [No Reserve]

Dr Desmond Fitzgerald collection, no.28.
Ex Nick Wright, 1990.
From the collection of Charlie Watts (The Rolling Stones drummer).

This lot has been checked against the Interpol Database of stolen works of art and is accompanied by search certificate no.13462-261733.

Cf. similar cat on display in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, Italy, accession number 18292; Scott, N.E., The cat of Bastet, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, xvii [1] Summer 1958, New York, 1-7; see also Malek, J., The Cat in Ancient Egypt, London, 1993.

The cat was the most sacred animal in ancient Egypt and associated with the cat-headed goddess Bastet, daughter of Re. When represented in human form as a cat-headed female, she usually holds a sistrum (a musical rattle) in her right hand with a supine cat on its top, and an aegis in her left. Small kittens are often shown at her feet. Her most important cult centre was at Bubastis (Tell Basta) in the north-east Delta. The site today is heavily ruined and the temple destroyed. Sir Flinders Petrie excavated at Bubastis and other nearby Delta sites in the 1880s. Tombs of some of the temple officials have been found nearby, and vast cemeteries of mummified cat burials left as votive offerings; so many thousands were found that they were used locally as fuel. Since Petrie’s investigations, the site has been abandoned and only in recent years have excavations begun to be undertaken. In painted nobles’ tombs at Thebes, a cat is often represented seated beneath the chair of the noble’s wife. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the festival of Bastet at Bubastis was the most elaborate of all those in Egypt. The Roman geographer Strabo wrote that the cat was so revered in Egypt that an Egyptian dashed into his burning house to save the cat, then returned to rescue his family.