No people on earth, perhaps, has been more closely associated with a fellow creature than the ancient Egyptians with their cats.
Some 4,000 years ago the Egyptians became the first people to domesticate the cat, which they referred to onomatopoetically as miw. Soon they began mummifying their deceased feline friends and representing them in lovely painted and sculpted images—such as the 10-inch-high bronze statue dating to the 26th Dynasty (664–525 B.C.).
At least by the Ptolemaic period, the Egyptians viewed cats as manifestations of Bastet, goddess of joy and fertility and protector of women in childbirth. Bastet was sometimes represented as a serene she-cat; at other times, she had the graceful body of a woman and the head of a cat. Millions of cats were bred and raised in catteries associated with temple precincts and later sacrificed as votive offerings.
The Egyptians’ devotion to cats had a practical side, too. The fat of a tomcat was smeared over walls and floors to deter rodents, according to a 16th-century B.C. papyrus. And cats were valued for their medicinal qualities. Bandages containing a mixture of cat fat and other substances were thought to relieve stiffness and arthritic pain, and the fur of female cats was mixed with human milk and resin and used as a poultice to heal burns.
Beginning in the mid-first millennium B.C., dead cats were taken to the city of Bubastis in the Delta, where they were embalmed and buried. Indeed, so many cats were interred in this manner that a century ago an enterprising businessman arranged to ship some 180,000 mummified cats from Bubastis to England to be processed into fertilizer.
The first-century B.C. Greek writer Diodorus Siculus tells us that cat corpses were usually treated with resin, cedar oil and spices before being wrapped in fine linen bandages. Scientific examination of mummified cats reveals that their internal organs were removed and replaced with sand or mud. (Cat organs were not preserved in canopic jars, as was often the case with human mummies.)
According to the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, the ancient Egyptians held cats in such high regard that when one died, its owners shaved their own eyebrows as a sign of mourning.
No people on earth, perhaps, has been more closely associated with a fellow creature than the ancient Egyptians with their cats.
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