Bastet on Pillar (E 4257)

A small copper alloy votive statuette from Egypt's Late Period, roughly 664 to 332 BCE, showing Bastet in her standard collared cat form, seated atop a papyriform column, a composition common in the mass-produced bronze votives dedicated at her cult centers in this period. A hieroglyphic dedicatory inscription on the piece names Ankhhor as the dedicatee and Horsaiset as his father, a typical formula asking Bastet's favor for the donor and his family. The statuette entered the Louvre's Department of Egyptian Antiquities in 1864 from the collection of Pacifique Henri Delaporte, inventory number E 4257, and is now displayed in the Sully Wing, Room 643. Bastet, daughter of the sun god Ra, was worshipped across Egypt as a protective and nurturing goddess, and this Late Period cat form is the iconography by which she is most widely recognized today.