History of Cats – Part 2

Posted by Jeanne on May 18, 2009

It started in Egypt

The first tame cats that anyone knows anything definite about showed up in Egypt about 3000 B.C. They were descended from an African wild cat and were very much like today’s house cat in size and proportion. They were short haired and gray in color with black stripes and spots on the body and legs. The Egyptians adored them and rarely, if ever, have cats had it so good again.

The cats, as always, made friends first with the grain farmers, whose storehouses they protected from rats and mice. This service proved so valuable that eventually the cat was elevated to Egypt’s large family of deities. She became Pasht, the Goddess of Light, and was worshiped at temples built in her honor. (The Egyptian word “mau” meant both “cat” and “light.”)

Cat holidays were celebrated with parades and revelry in the streets. Household cats were adorned with jeweled collars and earrings. Killing a cat became a crime punishable by death.

When a cat died, it was embalmed, wrapped in burial cloths, and buried in a special cat cemetery. Especially solicitous cat owners even embalmed a few mice so that Mau would not go hungry on her journey to the afterworld.

Cemeteries discovered by archeologists in the nineteenth century were found to contain hundreds of thousands of cat mummies. And, this being a practical era, the mummies were promptly sold by the ton for use as fertilizer.

The Egyptians excessive admiration for the cat eventually played a part in Egypt’s downfall. It is said that when the Persian king, Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, was besieging Pelusium in his classic invasion of Egypt, he threw live cats over the wall of the city. This heartless hailstorm of sacred mousers sent the Egyptians into a panic. While they were distracted and unnerved, their stronghold was overrun.

Cats and conquerors have rarely got on well together, incidentally, and Cambyses was a typical tyrant in this regard. It is probably too simple to say that mighty monarchs can’t stand the cat’s bland refusal to take any sort of loyalty or fealty oath, but the fact remains that Alexander the Great and Napoleon were cat haters and that Louis XVI of France took part in celebrations whose high point was the torturing of cats by burning.

How and when cats spread around the world is a matter of conjecture. Apparently, however, their emigration from Egypt began shortly after the Egyptians made it illegal to export them. Phoenician traders are sometimes credited with introducing cats to Italy. And, undoubtedly, pioneering cats began to jump ship at various ports as soon as their now-traditional friendship with sailors was established. In any event, the cat was known in Greece and Rome before the Christian era.

Once on the continent of Europe, the Egyptian tabbies evidently mated with the European wild cat, and the progress of the race was assured. The remains of cats have been found at Roman villas in Great Britain. By the fifth century A.D., the cat was comfortably situated in China, in Scotland, and in the Netherlands.

By the seventh century, the Prophet Mohammed. was renowned, among other things, for his fondness for cats, and the legend persists that he once cut the sleeve off a gown he wished to wear rather than disturb the cat sleeping on it.

By the tenth century, the cat was everywhere and greatly esteemed. In Saxony, Henry the Fowler ruled that anyone who injured a cat should pay a heavy fine. An early Prince of Wales, Howel Dda, enacted laws in 936 that set rates and values for cats of various ages and rat-catching abilities.

In the Far East, those relentless borrowers, the Japanese, having already obtained their written language from China, added the cat to their list of imports. Mao, as the Chinese called her, was so rare and so expensive at first that the Japanese decided that a cat-killer and his family would live under a curse for seven generations.

It appeared that the peaceful, hard-working cat had found her place as man’s ally in his endless battle against the marauding mouse and rat.