Catwatching Read Free Page A

not encourage them? For the cats, the scene must have been hard to believe. There all around them was a scurrying feast on a scale they had never encountered before.
    Gone were the interminable waits in the undergrowth. All that was needed now was a leisurely stroll in the vicinity of the vast grain stores and a gourmet supermarket of plump, grain-fed rodents awaited them. From this stage to the keeping and breeding of cats for increased vermin destruction must have been a simple step, since it benefited both sides.
    With our efficient modern pest-control methods it is difficult for us to imagine the significance of the cat to those early civilizations, but a few facts about the attitudes of the ancient Egyptians towards their beloved felines will help to underline the importance that was placed upon them. They were, for instance, considered sacred, and the punishment for killing one was death. If a cat happened to die naturally in a house, all the human occupants had to enter full mourning, which included the shaving-off of their eyebrows.
    Following death, the body of an Egyptian cat was embalmed with full ceremony, the corpse being bound in wrappings of different colours and its face covered with a sculptured wooden mask. Some were placed in catshaped wooden coffins, others were encased in plaited straws. They were buried in enormous feline cemeteries in huge numbers literally millions of them.
    The cat-goddess was called Bastet, meaning She-of-Bast. Bast was the city where the main cat temple was situated, and where each spring as many as half a million people converged for the sacred festival. About 100,000 mummified cats were buried at each of these festivals to honour the feline virgin-goddess (who was presumably a forerunner of the Virgin Mary). These Bastet festivals were said to be the most popular and best attended in the whole of ancient Egypt, a success perhaps not unconnected with the fact that they included wild orgiastic celebrations and 'ritual frenzies'. Indeed, the cult of the cat was so popular that it lasted for nearly 2,000 years. It was officially banned in AD 390, but by then it was already in serious decline. In its heyday, however, it reflected the immense esteem in which the cat was held in that ancient civilization, and the many beautiful bronze statues of cats that have survived bear testimony to the Egyptians' appreciation of its graceful form. A sad contrast to the ancient worship of the cat is the vandalizing of the cat cemeteries by the British in the last century.
    One example will suffice: a consignment of 300,000 mummified cats was shipped to Liverpool where they were ground up for use as fertilizer on the fields of local farmers. All that survives from this episode is a single cat skull which is now in the British Museum. The early Egyptians would probably have demanded 300,000 deaths for such sacrilege, having once torn a Roman soldier limb from limb for hurting a cat. They not only worshipped their cats, but also expressly prohibited their export.
    This led to repeated attempts to smuggle them out of the country as high-status house pets. The Phoenicians, who were the ancient equivalent of secondhand car salesmen, saw catnapping as an intriguing challenge and were soon shipping out high-priced moggies to the jaded rich all around the Mediterranean. This may have annoyed the Egyptians, but it was good news for the cat in those early days, because it introduced them to new areas as precious objects to be well treated.
    Plagues of rodents that were sweeping Europe gave the cat a new boost as a pest-controller, and it rapidly spread across the continent. The Romans were largely responsible for this, and it was they who brought the cat to Britain. We know that cats were well treated in the centuries that followed because of the punishments that are recorded for killing one. These were not as extreme as in ancient Egypt, but fines of a lamb or a sheep were far from trivial. The penalty devised