Bastet worship changed from being a lioness deity into being predominantly a major cat deity. Because domestic cats tend to be tender and protective of their offspring, Bastet was also regarded as a good mother, and she was sometimes depicted with numerous kittens. Consequently, a woman who wanted children sometimes wore an amulet showing the goddess with kittens, the number of which indicated her own desired number of children. The native Egyptian rulers were replaced by Greeks during an occupation of Egypt in the Ptolemaic Dynasty that lasted almost 300 years. The Greeks sometimes equated Bastet with one of their goddesses,
Bastet Egyptian as "pr-bꜣstt" (also transliterated as "Per-Bastet"), carries her name, literally meaning "House of Bastet". It was known in Greek as "Boubastis" ("Βούβαστις") and translated into Hebrew as "Pî-beset", spelled without the initial "t" sound of the last syllable. In the biblical Book of Ezekiel 30:17, the town appears in the Hebrew form "Pibeseth". Herodotus, a Greek historian who traveled in Egypt in the fifth century BCE, describes Bastet's temple at some length: The description offered by Herodotus and several Egyptian texts suggest that water surrounded the temple on three (out of four) sides, forming a type of lake known