The newspapers have recently been chronicling, as a fact provocative of especial wonder, the enterprise of some speculative merchant of New York, who has just been despatching a cargo of one hundred cats to the republic of New Granada, in which it would appear the race, owing, as we may believe, to the frequently disturbed state of the country, has become almost extinct.
Your cat is a domestic animal, and naturally conservative in its tastes—averse therefore to uproar, and to all those given to change. Its propensities are to meditation and contemplative tranquillity, for which reason it has ever been held in reverence by nations of a similar staid and composed disposition, and has been the favourite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their 'lives and safeties' were tendered more dearly than those of any other animal, whether biped or quadruped. 'He who has voluntarily killed a consecrated animal,' says this writer, 'is punished with death; but if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it, treating him with every cruelty, and sometimes without waiting for judgment to be passed. This treatment inspires such terror, that, if any person happen to find one of these animals dead, he goes to a distance from it, and by his cries and groans indicates that he has found the animal dead. This superstition is so deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians, and the respect they bear these animals is so profound, that at the time when their king, Ptolemy, was not yet declared the friend of the Roman people—when they were paying all possible court to travellers from Italy, and their fears made them avoid every ground of accusation and every pretext for making war upon them—yet a Roman having killed a cat, the people rushed to his house, and neither the entreaties of the grandees, whom the king sent for the purpose, nor the terror of the Roman name, could protect this man from punishment, although the act was involuntary. I do not relate this anecdote,' adds the historian, 'on the authority of another, for I was an eye-witness of it during my stay in Egypt.'[5]
During their lives, the consecrated cats were fed upon fish, kept for the purpose in tanks; and 'when one of them happened to die,' says the veracious writer just cited, 'it was wrapped in linen, and after the bystanders had beaten themselves on the breast, it was carried to the Tarichoea, where it was embalmed with coedria and other substances which have the virtue of embalming bodies, after which it was interred in the sacred monument.' It has puzzled not a little the learned archæologists, who have endeavoured to discover a profound philosophy figured and symbolised in the singular mythology of the Egyptians, to explain how it is that in Thebes, where the sacred character of the cat was held in the highest reverence, and cherished with the greatest devotion, not only embalmed cats have been found, but also the bodies of rats and mice, which had been subjected to the same anti-putrescent process. If, however, Herodotus is to be credited, the Egyptians owed a deep debt of gratitude to the mice; for the venerable historian assures us, and on the unquestionable authority of the Egyptian priests, that when Sennacherib and his army lay at Pelusium, a mighty corps of field-mice entered the camp by night, and eating up the quivers, bowstrings, and buckler-leathers of the Assyrian troops, in this summary fashion liberated Egypt from the terror of the threatened invasion. Probably the existence of mice-mummies may be accounted for in this way, and if—resorting to no violent supposition—we presume in the good work which the tiny patriots so sagaciously accomplished that their cousins-german the rats were assistant, the whole matter receives a satisfactory explication. The hypothesis, it is submitted, is not without plausible recommendations on its behalf. There is extant a fragment of a comedy, entitled 'The Cities,' written by the Rhodian poet Anaxandrides, in which the Egyptian worship of animals is amusingly enough quizzed. A translation will be found in Dr Prichard's Analysis of Egyptian Mythology. The lines referring to cat-worship are as follow:—
'You cry and wail whene'er ye spy a cat,
Starving or sick; I count it not a sin
To hang it up, and flay it for its skin;'
from which it appears this gay free-thinker was not only somewhat sceptical in his religious notions, but, moreover, a hard-hearted, good-for-nothing fellow—one who, had he lived in our times, would unquestionably have brought himself within the sweep of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Duke of Beaufort's Humanity Act.
We learn from Herodotus that in his days it was customary, whenever a cat died, for the whole household at once to go into mourning, and this although the lamented decease might have been the result of old age, or other causes purely natural. In the case of a cat's death, however, the eyebrows only were required to be shaved off; but when a dog, a beast of more distinguished reputation, departed this life, every inmate of the house was expected to shave his head and whole body all over. Both cats and dogs are watched and attended to with the greatest solicitude during illness. Indeed, by the ancient Egyptians the cat was treated much in the same way as are dogs amongst us: we find them even accompanying their masters on their aquatic shooting-excursions; and, if the testimony of ancient monuments is to be relied on, often catching the game for them, although it may be permitted to doubt whether they ever actually took to the water for this purpose.
In modern Egypt the cat, although more docile and companionable than its European sister, has much degenerated; but still, on account of its usefulness in destroying scorpions and other reptiles, it is treated with some consideration—suffered to eat out of the same dish with the children, to join with them in their sports, and to be their constant companion and daily friend. A modern Egyptian would esteem it a heinous sin indeed, to destroy, or even maltreat a cat; and we are told by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, that benevolent individuals have bequeathed funds by which a certain number of these animals are daily fed at Cairo at the Cadi's court, and the bazaar of Khan Khaleel.