Bastet some cats were found to have been mummified and buried, many next to their owners. More than 300,000 mummified cats were discovered when Bastet's temple was excavated. The main source of information about the Bastet cult comes from Herodotus who visited Bubastis around 450 BCE after the changes in the religious sect. He equated Bastet with the Greek Goddess Artemis. He wrote extensively about the religious sect. Turner and Bateson suggest that the status of the cat was roughly equivalent to that of the cow in modern India. The death of a cat might leave a family in great mourning
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