A Brief History of House Cats (Part III)

If cats seem ambivalent towards us, as the quotations from cat fan-sites indicate, then it may be a reflection of the wildly mixed feelings humans, too, have shown cats over the millennia.

The ancient Egyptian reverence for cats is well-known—and well-documented in the archaeological record: scientists found a cat cemetery in Beni-Hassan brimming with 300,000 cat mummies. Bastet, an Egyptian goddess of love, had the head of a cat, and to be convicted of killing a cat in Egypt often meant a death sentence for the offender. Ancient Romans held a similar—albeit tempered and secularized—reverence for cats, which were seen as a symbol of liberty. In the Far East, cats were valued for the protection they offered treasured manuscripts from rodents.

For some reason, however, cats came to be demonized in Europe during the Middle Ages. They were seen by many as being affiliated with witches and the devil, and many were killed in an effort to ward off evil (an action that scholars think ironically helped to spread the plague, which was carried by rats). Not until the 1600s did the public image of cats begin to rally in the West.

Nowadays, of course, cats are superstars: the protagonists of comic strips and television shows. By the mid-90s, cat services and products had become a billion-dollar industry. And yet, even in our popular culture, a bit of the age-old ambivalence remains. The cat doesn’t seem to be able to entirely shake its association with evil: After all, how often do you see a movie’s maniacal arch-villain, as he lounges in a comfy chair and plots the world’s destruction, stroke the head of a Golden Retriever

Thanks to David Zax, SMITHSONIAN.COM, June 30, 2007

A Brief History of House Cats (Part II)

All domestic cats descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris (thus Sylvester the Cat!), which literally means “cat of the woods.” Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and the process began up to 12,000 years ago. While 12,000 years ago might seem a bold estimate, it actually is a perfectly logical one, since that is precisely when the first agricultural societies began to flourish in the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent. When humans were predominantly hunters, dogs were of great use, and thus were domesticated long before cats. Cats, on the other hand, only became useful to people when we began to settle down, till the earth and—crucially—store surplus crops. With grain stores came mice, and when the first wild cats wandered into town, the stage was set for what the Science study authors call “one of the more successful ‘biological experiments’ ever undertaken.” The cats were delighted by the abundance of prey in the storehouses; people were delighted by the pest control.
Thanks to David Zax, SMITHSONIAN.COM, June 30, 2007