The Ancient Egyptians would mummify almost anything. Not just their pharaohs and nobles, but crocodiles, Nile fishes and even the great sacred Apis bulls and their mother cows, whose enormous granite sarcophagi amaze visitors to the catacombs of Saqqara near Cairo.
More mundane species were preserved by the thousand, including the curved-beak ibis, symbol of the scribe-god Thoth, and cats, the personification of the goddess Bastet. Galleries full of these, sold to commoners for making offerings (and including a fair number of well-bandaged fakes) are known from Saqqara and elsewhere.
These were all ritual depositions; what has not been seen hitherto is an indication of animals being cherished for themselves, as pets or companions. A new find by Polish archaeologists on the Red Sea coast of Egypt suggests that there at least, in Roman times and away from the religious focus of the Nile valley, some animals were loved pets, and mourned when they were buried.
Burials of small animals at Berenike suggest “a unique example of pet-keeping rather than religious or magical deposits”, Marta Osypinska reports in the latest issue of Antiquity. Almost a hundred complete animal skeletons dating to the first and second centuries AD were excavated in an area used as a rubbish dump for many years, although it was wasteland between a fort and a temple when the cemetery was initiated.
Almost 90 of the skeletons were of domestic cats: they were not mummified, but the dry atmosphere has left the bones well-preserved. About a third were fully adult, somewhat more died as kittens, and the rest were growing animals. They seem to have been free of pathological afflictions, and there is no sign of violent death — the mummified cats of the Nile valley often show signs of having been killed.
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Measurement of their bones “suggests a homogeneous population”, Ms Osypinska says, similar to other cats in northeastern Africa. So far there is no evidence for other types, such as the tamed jungle cat found in a Nile valley site some years ago, at Berenike.
Many were buried curled up, as though in their baskets. Two double burials each had an adult cat and a kitten. Some of them had grave goods, suggesting an affectionate owner in life, as the author reports: “Two young cats were found, each with a single ostrich egg-shell bead by their necks, and another three cats and a vervet monkey were buried with iron collars.”
While dogs in Egypt were sometimes found buried with humans — suggesting they were killed to accompany their owners into the afterlife — no such evidence applies to cats, in Egypt or elsewhere, she says. The Berenike pet cemetery “reflects different intentions and cultural practices to the Nile valley”, suggesting “that the finds should be interpreted as a cemetery of house pets rather than related to sacred or magical rites”.
Cats first became popular as pets in the first century AD, and they spread along with the movements of the Roman army. “The eclectic evidence, both Egyptian and Roman, reflects the adoption of the cat as a pet in this multicultural community. There are plenty of reasons for keeping cats in a port town, but the general segregation of kitten and adult cat inhumations suggests a more complex relationship than pragmatic coexistence”.
The Berenike pet cemetery appears “to be a unique site”. Pet-keeping, rather than the co-dependence of the hunter and his hound, has been assumed to be a modern phenomenon. The Berenike evidence suggests that it’s much older.
Antiquity Project Gallery, December 2016