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
Wadjet called the "Lady of Flame". She later became identified with the war goddess of Lower Egypt, Bastet, who acted as another figure symbolic of the nation, consequently becoming Wadjet-Bast. In this role, since Bastet was a lioness, Wadjet-Bastet was often depicted with a lioness head. After Lower Egypt had been conquered by Upper Egypt and they were unified, the lioness goddess of Upper Egypt, Sekhmet, was seen as the more powerful of the two warrior goddesses. It was Sekhmet who was seen as the "Avenger of Wrongs" and "the Scarlet Lady", a reference to blood, as the one with bloodlust.