Why Did Ancient Egyptians Love Cats So Much?

A cat sitting beneath a chair appears in Egyptian tomb art with the comfortable familiarity of an animal that belongs there.

Thousands of years later, other cats emerge from Egyptian cemeteries wrapped in linen, placed in decorated containers or represented by elegant bronze statues. At Bubastis, the great cult centre of the goddess Bastet, archaeologists found enormous numbers of cat burials and feline statuettes. At Saqqara, catacombs held still more.

Something happened between cats and ancient Egypt that went considerably beyond pest control.

But what?

Did Cats Choose Egypt First?

The relationship may have started with an extremely practical arrangement.

Agriculture creates grain stores. Grain stores attract rodents. Rodents attract wildcats. Humans then discover that the small predator lurking around the settlement is considerably more useful alive than chased away.

Genetic research suggests that domestic cats descend principally from the African and Near Eastern wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica.

Cat domestication began in the Near East during the rise of early farming communities, while an Egyptian cat population later contributed substantially to the animals that spread around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Egypt therefore probably did not invent the domestic cat from scratch.

It seems to have done something stranger: it took an already successful relationship and transformed it into culture, symbolism and religion.

That transformation is not difficult to imagine.

What Did a Cat Have to Do With a Goddess?

The most famous divine connection was Bastet.

Her principal cult centre was Bubastis in the Nile Delta. By the Late Period, Bastet was commonly represented either as a cat or as a woman with a feline head. She was associated with protection, fertility, childbirth and prosperity, while feline imagery could express a watchful, protective quality.

That makes the Egyptian cat more interesting than a simple “sacred animal.”

A cat could be simultaneously an ordinary creature stealing something from the kitchen and an animal whose form expressed something divine.

Egyptian religion was comfortable with this kind of overlap. Gods could manifest through animals without every specimen simply becoming a god walking around the courtyard. Particular species carried divine associations, temples kept sacred animals, and animal imagery allowed characteristics of the gods to become visible.

With Bastet, the cat's behaviour almost seems unusually well suited to the job.

She could be gentle and protective, yet she belonged to the same feline world as dangerous lioness goddesses such as Sekhmet. Domestic calm and lethal violence existed inside essentially the same shape.

Anyone who has watched a house cat sleep peacefully for fourteen hours and then dismantle a moth understands the theological potential.

Why Take Dead Cats to Bubastis?

Around the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and recorded something peculiar. When cats died, he wrote, they were taken to sacred buildings at Bubastis, embalmed and buried there.

Archaeology shows that animal mummification became a major religious practice, particularly during the first millennium BC and the Greco-Roman periods. Cat mummies were deposited in catacombs together with statuettes and other offerings connected with Bastet. Some hollow bronze cat figures were themselves designed to contain mummified remains.

Why would someone want one?

A votive animal mummy could function as an offering to a deity. A pilgrim visiting a sanctuary might dedicate a cat associated with Bastet in much the same broad religious logic that another worshipper might offer an object, food or incense.

Except this offering had once been alive.

And demand became enormous.

How Do You Produce That Many Sacred Cats?

This is where the relationship becomes difficult to fit into modern categories.

Scientific examination of Egyptian animal mummies indicates that many were young animals, and evidence from cat mummies suggests that at least some cats were deliberately killed for the votive trade. Researchers studying animal cults are still investigating how these animals were bred, kept and killed, but organised production appears to have supplied large religious centres with the numbers required by pilgrims.

To modern eyes, affection for cats and the deliberate production of cat mummies can seem contradictory.

For the Egyptians, perhaps they were not.

The animal's sacred value did not necessarily depend upon keeping every individual cat alive for twenty comfortable years beside someone's bed. A cat could matter because of what the species represented, because of its relationship with Bastet, because it lived within a household, because its preserved body could become an offering, or because several of these meanings existed at once.

Our categories of pet, sacred animal, sacrifice and religious object may simply divide things that Egyptian religion allowed to overlap.

What Did Egyptians See When They Looked at Them?

We cannot ask an Egyptian household whether the cat sleeping under the chair was loved as a pet, respected as something sacred, valued because it killed mice, or regarded as all three before breakfast.

But the surviving evidence suggests an unusually intimate relationship.

Cats entered Egyptian homes and art. Their form became associated with a powerful goddess. Bronze cats were dedicated in temples. Dead cats travelled to religious centres and were embalmed. Entire industries eventually existed around preserving them. Centuries later, their descendants spread outward from Egypt along human trade routes and helped populate the wider ancient world.

Perhaps that is what makes the Egyptian cat more interesting than the familiar claim that Egyptians simply “worshipped cats.”

Four thousand years later, cats still live inside our houses on roughly those terms.

Did ancient Egyptians see divinity in the cat because their religion was different from ours, or did they simply notice something about cats that we still have not quite managed to explain?