Why did the Egyptians worship cats?
Because they were the first to think that if you gave them a little attention then maybe, just maybe, they’d stay off your architectural Giza drawings you stayed up all night working on. But does it work? NO, the pharaoh comes over first thing in the morning and low and behold somehow there are inky paw marks where the burial chamber is supposed to be – so now it’s in the shape of a pat’s paw and the pharaoh has renamed it “architect ritual sacrifice room”. Fucking cat. Can you imagine a cat at the telegraph office? A google search of “cat telegraph office” produced nothing interesting but a poorly written joke but there has to be some good stories there. I bet C.O.K (cat on key) was a common excuse for a mistake. If only there was some way to do research that didn’t involve google! But I digress. Cats are not domesticated like dogs are. Dogs are part of the family in a way that cats are not. Cats are here to distract us just enough so that we won’t see the mother ship until it’s too l
If you’re an avid cat person, the answer of course is self- evident: Because cats are divine. Egyptians literally believed that to be true, to the point that if a household cat died, its owners would shave their eyebrows in mourning and lovingly transport the cat carcass to one of the cities devoted to mummifying cats for their journey to the next world. (They apparently didn’t make it. In 1888, about 300,000 cat mummies were discovered still lounging around this world in the ancient city of Beni Hassan. We guess it illustrates once again how hard it is to get cats to go where you want them to.) There were practical reasons for worshipping cats, though. The Egyptians were very dependent on grains for their main staples of bread and beer, and they knew how much the cats contributed to their lives and economy by keeping rats and mice in check. Unfortunately, this worship of the cat had its downside, too. In 525 B.C., the Persians went to war with the Egyptians. Mindful of the Egyptians’
