She is depicted as a lioness , the fiercest hunter known to the Egyptians. It was said that her breath formed the desert. She was seen as the protector of the pharaohs and led them in warfare. Upon death, Sekhmet continued to protect them, bearing them to the afterlife. Sekhmet is also a solar deity , sometimes called the daughter of Ra and often associated with the goddesses Hathor and Bastet. She bears the Uraeus , which associates her with Wadjet and royalty, and the solar disk. In order to placate Sekhmet's wrath, her priestesses performed a ritual before a different statue of the goddess on each day of the year.
This practice resulted in many images of the goddess being preserved. Most of her statuettes were rigidly crafted and do not exhibit any expression of movements or dynamism; this design was made to make them last a long time rather than to express any form of functions or actions she is associated with.
It is estimated that more than seven hundred statues of Sekhmet once stood in one funerary temple alone, that of Amenhotep III , on the west bank of the Nile. She was envisioned as a fierce lioness, and in art, was depicted as such, or as a woman with the head of a lioness, who was dressed in red, the color of blood. Sometimes the dress she wears exhibits a rosetta pattern over each breast, an ancient leonine motif, which can be traced to observation of the shoulder-knot hairs on lions.
Occasionally, Sekhmet was also portrayed in her statuettes and engravings with minimal clothing or naked. Tame lions were kept in temples dedicated to Sekhmet at Leontopolis. The royal biers were fashioned to represent Sekhmet symbolizing her role as protector, even in death. They are depicted in all images of the embalming rites, showing her head, the characteristic tufted tail, and her feet.
In the tombs, the coffins were placed on them. To pacify Sekhmet, festivals were celebrated at the end of battle, so that the destruction would come to an end. During an annual festival held at the beginning of the year, a festival of intoxication, the Egyptians danced and played music to soothe the wildness of the goddess and drank great quantities of wine ritually to imitate the extreme drunkenness that stopped the wrath of the goddessβwhen she almost destroyed humanity.
