Ancient Egyptian bestiary: Cats

Printout
For best results save the whole webpage (pictures included) onto your hard disk, open the page with Word 97 or higher, edit if necessary and print.
Printing using the browser's print function is not recommended.

Cats

Bastet
Source: 'Les Merveilles du Louvre', Hachette 1958

It appears that the house cat, Felis catus, arose from a small number of African Wildcats, Felis silvestris libyca, which underwent domestication, possibly self-domestication, in the Levant before the sixth millennium BCE.^[3] Cat remains dating to the pre-dynastic were found in a tomb near Asyut,^[2] but it is uncertain whether one can speak of truly domesticated cats before the second millennium BCE.^[4]
After their domestication house cats became pets, but continued to play an important part in keeping the rodents at bay which destroyed sizable portions of the vital grain stores. From the Middle Kingdom onwards cats were quite often depicted in tombs, both in domestic and hunting scenes.^[2]
Herodotus seems to have heard stories about how male lions kill cubs after taking over a pride and misapplied it to house cats.

Of the animals that live with men there are great numbers, and would be many more but for the accidents which befall the cats. For when the females have produced young they are no longer in the habit of going to the males, and these seeking to be united with them are not able. To this end then they contrive as follows,--they either take away by force or remove secretly the young from the females and kill them (but after killing they do not eat them), and the females being deprived of their young and desiring more, therefore come to the males, for it is a creature that is fond of its young.
Herodotus, Histories II
Project Gutenberg

This misunderstanding may have come about because the Egyptians never distinguished sharply between the various animal species. When during the Saite period a man erected a stela giving expression to the notion of sacredness of whole species of animals, the cats he referred to were probably rather the wild species Felis silvestris libyca and Felis chaus, the jungle cat:

I gave bread to the hungry, water [to] the thirsty, clothing to the naked; I gave food to the ibis, the hawk, the cat and the jackal.
Miramar, 664-525 BCE.^[5]

Fifteen hundred years earlier the nomarch Henku had expressed similar sentiments when he satisfied the wolves of the mountains and the fowl of heaven with the [flesh] of small cattle; the wolves in this styatement seem to have included all canine predators.^[5] By the Late Period the divinity of the cats was firmly entrenched in the Egyptian mind. Herodotus reports:

Moreover when a fire occurs, the cats seem to be divinely possessed; for while the Egyptians stand at intervals and look after the cats, not taking any care to extinguish the fire, the cats slipping through or leaping over the men, jump into the fire; and when this happens, great mourning comes upon the Egyptians.
And in whatever houses a cat has died by a natural death, all those who dwell in this house shave their eyebrows only, but those in which a dog has died shave their whole body and also their head. The cats when they are dead are carried away to sacred buildings in the city of Bubastis, where after being embalmed they are buried.
Herodotus, Histories II
Project Gutenberg

Cat mummy
Source: 'Ancient Egypt' by Lionel Casson, Time-Life books

Domesticated cats were carried to all corners of the Mediterranean, and new breeds began to appear, often strikingly different from their ancestors, e.g. Egyptian cats had significantly longer legs than their European descendants.

The goddess Bastet was represented as a cat, not a lazy, cuddly pet but a wild hunter. Because of this divine connection cats were often mummified. Large numbers of cats were killed at Saqqara and used as votive offerings to Bastet. Archaeologist have found that a large percentage of these mummies (about 4 out of 10) were fakes, containing little or no cat remains ^[1]. Similar practices in the falcon mummy trade were uncovered in antiquity.

[1] C. Callou, R. Lichtenberg and A. Zivie, "The cat mummies discovered in the Bubasteion of Saqqarah, Egypt", Poznan Symposium, 2003
[2] Ian Shaw, Paul Nicholson, The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, British Museum Press 1995, p.62
[3] Simon J. M. Davis, The Archaeology of Animals,Routledge, 1987, p.127
[4] David Anthony, Man and animals: living, working, and changing together, UPenn Museum of Archaeology, 1984, p.58
[5] James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Part One, § 281, footnote