Ancient Egypt is famous as the land where cats were worshipped. Egyptians mourned their dead cats by shaving their eyebrows, the stories go; killing a cat was punishable by death; and millions of cats were mummified and buried in vast cemeteries. The truth is more complicated — and in some ways stranger — than the legend. Cats were loved as pets and revered as the living images of the goddess Bastet, but they were also bred in huge numbers to be sacrificed. This page explores what we really know about cats in ancient Egypt, and how they came to hold such a special place in Egyptian life and religion.
Domestication
Cats were domesticated from the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), a small, tabby-coloured wildcat native to North Africa and the Near East. Genetic studies have shown that all domestic cats descend from this species.
For a long time it was assumed that cats were first domesticated in Egypt. But in 2004 archaeologists found a human burial on Cyprus, dating to about 7500 BCE, with a cat buried beside it — evidence that cats were living with people much earlier, probably in the farming villages of the Fertile Crescent, where grain stores attracted mice. A 2017 genetic study suggested two waves of cat domestication: one from the Near East, and a later one from Egypt, whose cats spread throughout the Mediterranean world from around 1500 BCE.
In Egypt, the earliest evidence of a special relationship between people and cats comes from Hierakonpolis, where a cemetery from around 3700 BCE contained the remains of six cats, including kittens, buried together — possibly kept in captivity by elite households.
Why Egyptians Valued Cats
Cats offered the Egyptians practical benefits:
- Pest control. Egypt’s economy rested on grain, stored in great granaries. Cats protected the harvest from rats and mice.
- Snake killing. Egypt had many dangerous snakes, including cobras and vipers. Cats will attack and kill snakes, and Egyptians admired them for it.
- Companionship. Tomb paintings from the New Kingdom show cats sitting under their owners’ chairs at banquets, sometimes eating fish or gnawing bones, sometimes wearing collars. They were clearly beloved household pets.
A famous painting from the tomb of Nebamun (c. 1350 BCE), now in the British Museum, shows a tabby cat in the papyrus marshes, leaping to catch birds while its owner hunts. The Egyptians may have used cats as hunting companions.
The Egyptian word for cat was simply miu (for a male) and miit (for a female) — an imitation of the cat’s meow. The name “Miit” was sometimes given to girls.
The Cat and the Sun God
In Egyptian religion, cats were associated with the sun god Ra. In chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, the “Great Cat” of Heliopolis kills the chaos serpent Apophis beneath the sacred persea tree, cutting off its head with a knife. The cat is identified with Ra himself. Vignettes from the tombs of the workmen at Deir el-Medina show a ginger or tabby cat with a knife, slicing the serpent.
Cats were also linked with the Eye of Ra — the fierce daughter of the sun god who could take the form of a lioness, and whose calmer form was Bastet (see Bastet: The Cat Goddess of Ancient Egypt).
Mourning Cats
The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BCE) wrote that when a cat died in a house naturally, all the inhabitants shaved their eyebrows as a sign of mourning. (For a dog, they shaved their whole bodies and heads.) He also reported that dead cats were taken to Bubastis to be embalmed and buried in sacred tombs.
Herodotus also claimed that when a house caught fire, the Egyptians were more concerned about saving the cats than putting out the flames, and that cats, seized with a strange frenzy, would leap into the fire. This detail is almost certainly fanciful.
The Law and the Cat
The historian Diodorus Siculus, who visited Egypt around 60–56 BCE, wrote that anyone who killed a cat, even by accident, was put to death. He claimed to have witnessed an incident in which a Roman — at a time when Egypt was anxiously trying to stay on good terms with Rome — accidentally killed a cat. A mob gathered at his house, and neither the officials sent by the king nor fear of Rome could save him.
There is no evidence from Egyptian legal documents that killing a cat was a capital crime. But the story shows how powerful popular reverence for the animal could be — at least in the late period.
The Cat Mummies
The most dramatic evidence of the Egyptian cult of cats comes from the great animal cemeteries of the Late Period and Ptolemaic period (c. 700–30 BCE). At Bubastis, Saqqara, Beni Hasan, and other sites, archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of mummified cats.
These were not pets. They were votive offerings. A pilgrim visiting the temple of Bastet would buy a mummified cat from the priests and dedicate it to the goddess with a prayer. The mummies were sometimes wrapped with elaborate patterns of linen bandages, and given painted faces and ears.
X-ray and CT scans of cat mummies have revealed disturbing facts. Most of the cats were very young — kittens of two to four months, or young cats of nine to twelve months — and many had broken necks, showing they had been deliberately killed. Temples apparently maintained breeding colonies of cats to meet the demand from pilgrims. Some “cat mummies,” when scanned, turned out to contain only a few bones, or mud and straw, suggesting that some temple workers sold fakes.
In the nineteenth century, cat mummies were treated as a raw material. In 1890, a shipment of about 180,000 cat mummies from Beni Hasan — some 19 tons — arrived in Liverpool and was auctioned off as fertilizer. The auctioneer used a cat skull as his gavel.
The Paradox
How can we reconcile the Egyptians’ love for cats with the mass killing of kittens? The answer lies in how Egyptians understood the relationship between sacred animals and gods.
A cat was not itself a god. But every cat could serve as a vessel for the divine power of Bastet. The sacrifice and mummification of a cat was a way of sending a messenger to the goddess, carrying a prayer. From the Egyptian point of view, it may have been a great honour for the animal.
At the same time, there were individual sacred cats that lived in the temples, were carefully tended, and were believed to be special manifestations of the goddess, much like the Apis bull at Memphis. And in ordinary homes, cats were loved pets, mourned and buried when they died.
The Cat’s Legacy
Egypt’s cats spread throughout the ancient world. Phoenician and Greek traders carried them around the Mediterranean, and the Romans brought them to northern Europe. Nearly every domestic cat alive today has some Egyptian ancestry. The long association between cats and the divine in Egypt may also lie behind their later reputation in Europe — where, after the Middle Ages, cats were sometimes feared as the companions of witches.
The graceful bronze cat statues of the Late Period, with their earrings, collars, and serene gaze, remain among the most beloved objects in the world’s museums, and the image of the sacred Egyptian cat has become a lasting part of our imagination.
Last reviewed: September 2026.