The same goddess who sent pestilence could withhold and heal it, and Sekhmet was closely tied to medicine: her priests functioned as a recognised class of physicians, and medical and magical texts invoke her both as the sender of the messengers of disease, the demons thought to bring the yearly plagues, especially at the dangerous turn of the year, and as the power that could call them off. Pharaohs sought her protection, and Amenhotep III had hundreds of black granite statues of the seated goddess set up at Thebes, perhaps to appease her against plague; many survive in museums around the world. Worshipped at Memphis as the consort of Ptah and mother of Nefertem, she embodies the Egyptian conviction that the fiercest divine power was also the surest defence.
Sekhmet's name appears already in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, inscribed inside royal pyramids from the twenty-fourth century BCE, where the king is sometimes described as born of Sekhmet or nursed by her, a royal epithet asserting that Egypt's ruler shared in the fierce protective power of the goddess from birth. This Old Kingdom evidence makes Sekhmet's cult, in some form, as old as the pyramids themselves, predating by many centuries the New Kingdom sources, the Destruction of Mankind myth and the mass statue commissions of Amenhotep III, that now supply most of what is popularly known about her.