page_title: Animal mummy
section_title: Religious purposes
hierarchical_section_title: Animal mummy / Egyptian beliefs about animals / Religious purposes
caption_attribution_description: English: A priestess offers gifts of food and milk to the spirit of a cat. On an altar stands the mummy of the deceased, and the tomb is decorated with frescoes, urns of fresh flowers, lotus blossoms, and statuettes. The priestess kneels as she wafts incense smoke toward the altar. In the background, a statue of Sekhmet or Bastet guards the entrance to the tomb.
context_page_description: Animal mummification was common in ancient Egypt. They mummified various animals. It was an enormous part of Egyptian culture, not only in their role as food and pets, but also for religious reasons. They were typically mummified for four main purposes—to allow beloved pets to go on to the afterlife, to provide food in the afterlife, to act as offerings to a particular god, and because some were seen as physical manifestations of specific deities that the Egyptians worshipped. Bastet, the cat goddess, is an example of one such deity. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near Istabl Antar discovered a mass grave of felines, ancient cats that were mummified and buried in pits at great numbers.
context_section_description: Ancient Egyptian religion was characterized by polytheism, the belief in multiple deities. Prior to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, there were a tremendous number of these deities, each representative of a different element of the natural world. After the great unification, a more limited list of deities developed. These were usually depicted as having a human body and an animal head, further emphasizing the importance of animals in Egyptian religion. Over time, religious cults emerged for the worship of each specific deity. Two main types of worship distinguished the cults—the first choosing to worship the god through mass mummified animal offerings and the second selecting a totem animal to represent the god, which was mummified at the time of its death.
caption: The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat, by John Reinhard Weguelin (1886).
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