Bubastis definition
An ancient city of northeast Egypt in the Nile Delta. It was a religious center for the worship of the cat-headed god Bast.
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Bubastis, capital of the 19th nome of Lower Egypt, is now represented by a great mound of ruins called Tell Basta, near Zagazig, including the site of a large temple (described by Herodotus) strewn with blocks of granite.
Herodotus describes the festival of Bubastis, which was attended by thousands from all parts of Egypt and was a very riotous affair; it has its modern equivalent in the Moslem festival of the sheikh Said el Badawi at Tanta.
Khufu's work in the temple of Bubastis is proved by a surviving fragment, and he is figured slaying his enemy at Sinai before the god Thoth.
Two tablets at the mines of Wadi Maghara in the peninsula of Sinai, a granite block from Bubastis, and a beautiful ivory statuette found by Petrie in the temple at Abydos, are almost all that can be definitely assigned to Khufu outside the pyramid at Giza and its ruined accompaniments.
Busiris is here probably an earlier and less accurate Graecism than Osiris for the name of the Egyptian god Usiri, like Bubastis, Buto, for the goddesses Ubasti and Uto.