Ancient Egyptian Sacrifices Helped Cats Become Human Companions
In ancient Egypt, mass cult ritual sacrifices of cats gave rise to the furry felines becoming human companions, according to a pair of new preprint studies.
Ancient Egypt is the best known civilization for cat domestication and worship. Mummified cat remains and deities like Bastet suggested that cats and humans lived alongside each other.
However, it is still unclear as to where and how cats went from being wild hunters to household pets. Then, in 2001, scientists discovered a 9,500-year-old grave in Cyprus that contained the remains of a human and a feline, which seemed to indicate that cat domestication began on the Mediterranean island.
The theory was that cats in and around Cyprus followed early farmers and eventually got used to living with humans over thousands of years. But now, this theory has been debunked.
One study led by a researcher from the University of Exeter compared bone measurements of the Cyprus cat with bones from wild and domestic cats across Europe. The results revealed that the animal on Cyprus was actually a European wildcat, not a domesticated cat.
Another study from the University of Rome Tor Vergata analyzed the Cyprus cat’s nuclear DNA and also found that the remains belonged to a wildcat.
The North African wildcat is still considered the closest living relative to today’s domestic cat. Mummies of Egyptian cats dating from 500 to 0 B.C.E. remain the oldest known examples of domesticated cats, pointing to Egypt as the origin site of cat domestication again.
Researchers suspect that cats were first tamed to be sacrificed in mass cult rituals for the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet rather than as pets.
The goddess of pleasure, protection, and good health was first portrayed with a lion’s head, but she came to be depicted with the head of a cat around the first millennium B.C.
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“This transformation was coincident with the rise of cat sacrifice, whereby millions of free-ranging and specifically-reared cats were mummified as offerings to the goddess,” wrote the researchers of the new study.
Excavations have also found that the temples and sanctuaries built in Bastet’s honor were located around agricultural settlements, which would have contained large numbers of rodents and their wildcat predators.
“This would have provided the context for the tighter relationship between people and cats that led to the wildcat’s domestication, motivated by their newly acquired divine status,” wrote the researchers.
As humans raised cats in close quarters, the felines grew more tolerant of people and other animals. Eventually, this could have created a population of cats that were more docile than their ancestors.
It is not uncommon for the domestication of animals to be driven by religious cults. Previous research has shown that the spread of fallow deer is associated with the Greek goddess Artemis. The cult of Bastet could have caused the dispersal of cats in much the same way.
Both preprint studies were posted on bioRxiv.
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