Bastet is the ancient Egyptian goddess of the home, of women, of fertility and of protection, and above all the goddess whose cult centre was the Delta city of Bubastis. Her history runs from ferocity toward gentleness. In her earliest form she was a lioness, a fierce solar goddess barely distinguishable from Sekhmet, and like Sekhmet she was called a daughter of the sun god Ra and one of his defenders, turning her savagery against his enemy, the serpent Apophis, who threatened to swallow the sun. Over the centuries her image softened: from about the first millennium BCE she is shown as a domestic cat or a cat-headed woman, keeping her protective power but exchanging the lioness's open menace for the cat's watchful poise. The cat itself, valued for guarding grain-stores against vermin and prized in Egyptian households, became her sacred animal.
Bastet's name is attested as early as the Second Dynasty, inscribed on stone vessels found at Saqqara and dated to around the twenty-ninth century BCE, making her cult, in some form, one of the oldest continuously documented in Egyptian religion, already active centuries before the pyramids of Giza were built and long before her later, better-known cat-headed form had developed.