Head of a cat

The cat was sacred to the goddess Bastet, and was offered in sanctuaries and deposited in animal necropoleis throughout Egypt. This cat has deep-cut eyes for the addition of inlay and fine, incised lines marking the tufts of hair on the ears and the whiskers. From the way the figure is broken, it is hard to know if this piece was a separately crafted cat head or was a fragment from one continuous cupreous casting of a seated cat. It is comparable in size and shape, however, to figures such as 04.2.589, which suggests that it was designed as a separately cast head.

The function of these large cat heads is ambiguous. They have been found in offering contexts, and it is commonly assumed that they formed part of a composite statuette; the full statuette, when intact, probably would have had a hollow wooden body and held a cat mummy inside, much as similar large hollow copper alloy statuettes did. However, these figures are almost never found with the composite bodies, even at sites where wood is relatively well preserved. It is possible that in some cases these cat heads were dedicated on their own, or were purposefully disassembled from their bodies, which were then discarded or used in another way.