THE SHORT-HAIRED DOMESTIC CAT. The domestic cat in history and legend. Part 5.

    History relates how, in the course of this Persian attack on Egypt, reverence for cats proved fatal for the brave Egyptians defending the vital fortress of Pelusion. After countless vain attempts to take the fortress by storm, the Persians hit on the cunning idea of seizing all the living cats they could find and strapping them to their shields. The Egyptians naturally did not dare to risk killing the creatures, and in desperation threw down their arms

THE SHORT-HAIRED DOMESTIC CAT. The domestic cat in history and legend. Part 4.

    Cats soon came to be so highly valued that, if fire broke out in a house, the cat would be the first to be rescued. When a cat died, the owners would cut off their hair or shave off their eyebrows as a symbol of morning. The main shrine of Bast was in Bubastis, the city of the goddess on the lower Nile, and here the cat was given particular honour and reverence, as a source of human good fortune and divine blessing. As the the symbol of Bast, the cat goddess, it was worshipped as the guardian of the home, and protector of women and children. In later times, her divinity was extended to make her goddess of elegance, grace, coquetry, sensual love and pleasure. Even when the Pharaohs burst upon Egypt in 1000 BC, and 500 years later when the Persians invaded under King Cambyses, the cat goddess was spared and her cats continued to be worshipped as before.

THE SHORT-HAIRED DOMESTIC CAT. The domestic cat in history and legend. Part 3.

    The animal symbol associated with Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war, was the lion, and from each of the newly conquered territories Egypt's armies would send back a likeness of the lion to their homeland. These were placed in temples and throughout the land as a representation of the goddess, an object of worship and a source of her protection. In the Temple of the sun at Heliopolis the great god Ra was warshipped in the form of a cat. There, too, Sekhmet, the terrible Big Cat, was worshipped alongside Bast, the kindly little cat. Bast, at first also lion-headed, was later visualised as a cat-headed woman.

THE SHORT-HAIRED DOMESTIC CAT. The domestic cat in history and legend. Part 2.

     It seems that the Kaffir cat was predestined to become a culture-follower, and searched man out of its own accord. We know, furthermore, that the settled Egyptian farmers were greatly afficted by the severe damage done by mice and rats to their hard-won stores of grain. They were always dependent on whether the Nile would flood and briefly make the land fertile, or wether the mass of water from Central Africa would fail to reach them, resulting in aridity and drought. Thus, in order to survive, it was essential for the Egyptians to store ample supplies in their granaries. Naturally these stores of grain attracted hordes of rodents. It was not long before the Egyptians discovered that these pests were the cats' favourite prey. This may have been what caused the cat to become an object of Egyptian cult worship as the 'protector' of their grain supplies.