Cats in Ancient Egypt - Funerary Traditions

Funerary Traditions

Herodotus noted that cats that died anywhere in Egypt were often taken to Bubastis to be mummified and buried in the great cemetery, but this may or may not have been the case. At the burial site in Bubastis the Swiss Egyptologist Édouard Naville found more than 20 m³ (720 cubic feet) of cat remains but also a great deal of evidence of cremation. Naville found stacks of cat bones in many pits, the walls of which were made up of bricks and clay. Near each pit lay a furnace, its bricks blackened from fire. This discovery causes some problems. The mummification and preservation of the body was intended to make it possible for the deceased's ka to locate its host and subsequently be reborn into the afterlife. As the body would have to be intact for this process to occur, cremation would seem an undesirable way of dealing with the body of a sacred creature with a ka. Nevertheless, many cats were afforded the full embalming ceremony and buried in other great cemeteries along the Nile.

In her book The Cult of the Cat, Patricia Dale-Green states that, "The cat's body was placed in a linen sheet and carried amidst bitter lamentations by the bereaved to a sacred house where it was treated with drugs and spices by an embalmer". She goes on to state that although the cat of an Egyptian noble would receive more extravagant burial status, the body of a worker's cat would still be carefully prepared and the embalming carried out with the same conscientiousness as for a human body, often with provisions for the afterlife such as pots of milk and even mummified mice.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this appreciation shown more than in the colossal tomb at the temple of Bast discovered in 1888. This tomb, outside of Beni Hasan, held more than nineteen tonnes of animal mummies and remains, the vast majority being cats but a number of mongooses, dogs, and foxes were amongst the specimens that made it to the British Museum. The farmer who made the discovery sold most of the tomb's contents to be ground up as fertilizer, but fortunately a number of specimens made it into the hands of scientists for testing and examination. Some of these are on display at the British Museum.

The sole Egyptologist to visit the site, William Martin Conway, wrote: "The plundering of the cemetery was a sight to see, but one had to stand well windward. The village children came and provided themselves with the most attractive mummies they could find. These they took down the river bank to sell for the smallest coin to passing travelers. The path became strewn with mummy cloth and bits of cats' skulls and bones and fur in horrid positions, and the wind blew the fragments about and carried the stink afar". (quoted in Tabor p26).

Recently, during the making of his documentary for the BBC, Cats: The Rise of the Cat, Roger Tabor discovered a further cat cemetery at Bast's temple. This find consists of a twenty centimetre-thick layer of compressed mummies which spans more than sixty metres in length.