Eugene Parnell

The ancient Egyptians loved mummifying other things besides people. I remember visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo once, years and years ago, and, despite just being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of amazing things to see, somehow the mummified crocodile stuck in my mind. I found an image of one quite similar on Flickr:

Mummified crocodile. Apparently from a museum in Wien.

The Egyptians also mummified cats. The image here is funny and macabre at the same time. It looks as much like a homemade child’s doll from a pioneer homestead as it does an Egyptian mummy– or possibly a rejected prop from a Brothers Quay film.  So much attention is paid to the ears and eyes, they are rendered right in the cloth, and the pupils are even painted on. It’s cute and slightly eerie at the same time.

A mummified cat on display at the British Museum, London.

From this article in Scientific American on the origins of the domestic house cat:

By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

Apparently the export of live cats from Egypt was banned for centuries, but there was a thriving cottage industry in cat mummies, which were created as offerings to the goddess Bastet and, assumably, sold to pilgrims, who them presented them to the goddess at the temple. Which, I suppose, would explain the effort expended to make them look cute– who wants to go to church with an ugly kitty mummy tucked under one’s arm?