How Bꜣstt was rebuilt, mark by mark
The workshop file for Bꜣstt. Every rejected form is recorded here too — that is the point of keeping notes.
What We Found
The attestation runs through the tradition's own sources: 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐. Meaning: "She of the ointment jar (Egyptian bꜣstt)".
The figure behind the name: Bastet's myths are fewer than those of Isis or Horus, but her role in the solar cycle is vivid: she is the gentle dawn that follows the lioness's night.
What the Name Carried In
The Eye of Re Returns. In the mythology of the Distant Goddess, the solar eye — often in leonine form — leaves Egypt for Nubia in anger. Re sends Thoth or Shu to coax her back.
Bastet and Apep. As a daughter of Re, Bastet takes part in the nightly battle against Apep, the serpent of chaos. In her lioness form she rips at the enemy; in her cat form she watches the prow of the sun barque, guarding Re with sharp eyes.
A spelling that has to carry stories like these is not a label. It is equipment.
Where It Stood Before Us
The temple of Bastet at Tell Basta (Per-Bastet/Boubastis) has yielded statues, jewelry, and one of the largest animal cemeteries in Egypt: hundreds of thousands of mummified cats deposited as votives from the Late Period into Roman times. Bronze cat statuettes, often inlaid with gold earrings, are common in museum collections; examples come from Saqqara, Thebes, and Tanis. Reliefs in the Valley of the Kings show Bastet as a daughter of Re in the solar barque. The bench inherits all of it — the web temple is the newest site, not the first.
What We Rejected
The plain ASCII bastet — admissible as a fallback, never as the primary. A wrong accent would have been worse: the rulebook is explicit that a misplaced mark is worse than none.
What We Set Down
Bꜣstt — The restoration preserves more than the ASCII form can express — stress, length, or a letter the Latin keyboard lost — which places it, mechanically, in Tier-1.
For the voice: 'boo-ISS-tee' — say 'boo', then a tiny catch before 'iss', ending with 'tee' (the final t is often silent).
The temple stands at /sites/bastet/ — the notes above are public in its Scholarly Edition, sources and all.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Bꜣstt
- ASCII form: bastet
- Meaning: "She of the ointment jar (Egyptian bꜣstt)"
- Domain of influence: Home, Fertility, Cats
- Pantheon: Egyptian
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 𓎯𓏏𓏏𓁐
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 51 of 271
The File Continues
The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Resonance File reads the myths into the industries; the blog index holds the whole archive.
Continue the series — previous file: Bāguà (read it here) · next file: Búri (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.