9,500 Year Old Cat Memorial
Worshipped as idols, cats have been used for pest control and good luck as well as pets. Today there are more than 90 million domestic cats in the United States and people still sit in awe of these creatures and consider them to be spiritual beings. The earliest known cat domestication was in ancient Egypt where experts believe that the Egyptians tamed and bred felines to produce a distinct species by the 20th century B.C. Today the world is still fascinated with cats, and why pet memorials and methods of remembering our feline companions just keeps on growing.
In Ancient Egypt, the cat, or miw, meaning to see, was a sacred, respected companion that was venerated more than any culture in history. Ancient Egyptians revered cats, and they were often mummified and buried in tombs right along with their owners. It was also considered a high crime to kill a cat, punishable by death. If a pet cat died the entire family would go through a period of mourning – often shaving their eyebrows to express their grief. They believed in the afterlife, therefore the deceased cats were usually mummified and entombed in a cat memorial along with the owner’s fine jewelry.
Domesticated Egyptian cats were used as pest control to ward off snakes and rodents. In time, the cat became a god, and cats are often represented in Egyptian mythology in the form of the feline goddesses named Bastet, or Sekhmet, and other deities. In early times Bast, also written as ‘Bastet’ by the scribes in later times was a goddess usually depicted as a cat, or as a woman with the head of a cat.
In 2001 French archaeologists found the carefully interred mummified remains of cat memorial in a 9,500-year-old grave site on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus along with seashells, polished stones and decorative artifacts and offerings including axes, ochre and flint tools. This find predates the known early Egyptian art that depicted cats by 4,000 years or more.
