THE CAT IN ANCIENT EGYPT
By Jaromir Malek, published by the British Museum Company at £9.99. 144pp including 90 colour illustrations. ISBN: 0-7141-1970-9 (Reviewed by Helen Clipsom)
For as long as humans and cats have shared a hearthfire, the humans have been fascinated by their elegant, elusive companions. The thoughts of the cats are not on record, but are believed to have been benign as long as sufficient milk was included in the deal.
The Ancient Egyptians were among the first to domesticate she-who-mews (miu-t, as her name is in the Kemitic language), and Egypt can claim the one of the longest acquaintances with the smallest member of the genus. In this revised and updated edition of The Cat in Ancient Egypt, Dr Jaromir Malek, Keeper of the Archive at the Griffith Institute, Oxford, sets out to provide a definitive examination of their relationship.
People and cats seem to have first got together during the change from a nomadic to a more settled way of life, which took place around 4000 BC, although evidence from this period is slight. Textual and pictorial evidence of the cat as a domestic animal exists from the Old Kingdom onwards: some of the earliest evidence is the use of the name Miu or Ta-miu for girls. One can think of it perhaps as the equivalent to the English name Kitty.
In the Middle and New Kingdoms, the cat is a regular feature in secular art, and much of the book’s 90 colour and 21 black and white illustrations are taken up with pictures of cats in domestic situations. “The cat under the chair” was a familiar attendee at banquets, sometimes fighting for space with a pet goose. Domestic cats also appear in hunting, fishing and fowling scenes. The best known of these is from the tomb of Nebamun, and Dr Malek devotes two colour plates and several pages to the topic of cats in hunting scenes, exploring the myth that the Egyptians trained cats to retrieve birds from the marsh.
The most interesting, and charming, section on the domestic cat features cartoons drawn on ostraca (limestone flakes) by the artists of Deir-el-Medina, the tomb builders of the Valley of the Kings. Here, in a whimsical turnaround of everyday life, cats are shown in such unlikely occupations as duckherds and hairdressers, with one particularly splendid scene showing a lady mouse attended by a cat doing up her large wig, while a nursemaid cat carries her mouse baby in a sling.
Curiously, during all this time, the African wild cat, Felis Sylvestris Lybica, makes only limited appearance in Egyptian art. Dr Malek includes a chapter on the wild cats – Felis sylvestris sybica, Felis chaus (the marsh cat) and Felis Serval - but other small predators also get a showing. The ichneumon or mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon) and the genet (Genetta genetta) are more frequently found in tomb art depicting the wild environment, and Dr Malek uses this as an opportunity to show how art in this case does not necessarily imitate life.
In the chapter on Divine cats, Malek explores what the cat as god, the cat-headed god, and the god who could take the form of the cat might have meant to the Egyptians in terms of more codified religious belief and also in popular superstition. Unlike many other animals, the cat did not start out associated with some local deity, but seems to have grown gradually to prominence through its own popularity, although in a religious setting, cats could it seems be either domestic or wild. At one extreme is “the Great Tomcat (miu oa) which split the ished-tree”, the “great cat, a form of the god Ra” – a large bloodthirsty animal who slays Apophis and cuts him up into collops with a big knife. At the other is “housewife Bastet” surrounded by her kittens, carrying a sistrum in one hand and the aegis of her sister-deity Sekhmet in the other, with a marketing basket tucked under her elbow just like any other harassed mum who wishes she has three arms.
He also looks at the practice of mummifying cats, examining the reasons for such action, the source of the cats for mummifying, and the methods used, exploring how the pragmatic Egyptians could make a virtue out of the mummification of a sacred animal, while at the same time killing the animal in order to mummify it.
The Prophet Mohammed is said to have cut off the sleeve of his cloak, rather than disturb the cat that was sleeping on it. Cats are still found today, sleeping in quiet corners of mosques, much as they must have slept in the temples and palaces of Ancient Egypt. For those who wish to find out more about this ancient animal, she-who-mews, Dr Malek’s book is the definitive resource.