Egypt's sacred cat mummies ended up as fertiliser in Liverpool
Ancient Egyptians buried cats by the hundreds of thousands, embalmed and wrapped as offerings to the goddess Bastet. When a shipment of thousands of animal mummies reached Liverpool in 1890, most of them cats, the bulk was sold off as fertiliser, and only a small share went to a university museum.
Cats earned their place by being useful. Egyptians praised them for killing venomous snakes, rodents and birds that raided crops, and from the First Dynasty onward they were linked with protecting the pharaoh. The earliest known cat-headed deity, Mafdet, guarded royal chambers against snakes and scorpions. Bastet started out lion-headed; a wall painting at Saqqara from the Fifth Dynasty shows a small collared cat, suggesting tamed African wildcats lived in the royal quarters by the 26th century BC.
Pets appear too. A tomb at Umm El Qa'ab held 17 cat skeletons from the early 20th century BC, with small pots beside them thought to have held milk. Tomb paintings at Thebes show cats lounging under chairs at banquets or joining hunts in the marshes. The first known mummified cat lay in a carved limestone sarcophagus from about 1350 BC and is thought to have been the beloved pet of Prince Thutmose.
From around the 950s BC, Bastet's temple at Bubastis boomed, and house cats came to be seen as her living form. Herodotus described its yearly festival as the biggest in Egypt, drawing several hundred thousand pilgrims. Animal mummies became popular offerings from 664 BC, and the sheer numbers suggest cats were bred for the purpose, supported by a trade in food, oils and resins. Diodorus Siculus reports that around 60 BC a crowd killed a Roman who had killed a cat, despite Ptolemy XII trying to step in.
After Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, cats drifted apart from religion, and imperial edicts had banned pagan rites by the late fourth century AD. Nineteenth-century diggers found cemeteries almost beyond counting: more than 200,000 mummified animals, mostly cats, came out of Beni Hasan alone. In 1907 the British Museum received 192 cat mummies that Flinders Petrie dug up at Giza.
Source: Cats in ancient Egypt
