Cats in History: From Ancient Egypt to the Internet

How did cats become domestic?

The usual explanation is simple: early farmers stored grain, grain drew rats and mice, and wildcats came for the rodents. People found the cats useful, and the cats found people useful back.

The clearest early proof comes from Shillourokambos, a Neolithic village on Cyprus. Archaeologists found a cat buried next to a person in a grave about 9,500 years old, as National Geographic reported. Cats are not native to Cyprus, so people must have brought them to the island. The cat was large and resembled the African wildcat more than today’s house cats.

That grave is thousands of years older than the famous cat art of Egypt, which is why Egypt is no longer seen as the place where the bond began.

Cats in ancient Egypt and the goddess Bastet

Egypt is where cats became truly sacred. They were the animal of Bastet, a goddess linked with protection, music and dance, whose main temple stood at Bubastis in the eastern Nile Delta. Bastet was first shown as a lioness and later, more and more, as a cat or a woman with a cat’s head.

People offered mummified cats at her temples, sometimes inside fine bronze or wooden containers. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a bronze cat statuette made to hold a mummified cat, from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BCE).

Ship’s cats and working cats

For centuries, ships carried cats to protect food and ropes from rats. A few of them became legends.

Trim sailed with the navigator Matthew Flinders, who mapped and circled the Australian mainland in 1801–03. A bronze statue of Trim sits on a window ledge of the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, just behind the statue of Flinders himself.

Simon served on the Royal Navy ship HMS Amethyst. In 1949, during the Yangtze Incident, he was wounded by shell blast and still kept the ship’s rats down. He became the first cat awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, the animal award for gallantry.

Working cats are still around. Larry, a tabby recruited from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, moved into 10 Downing Street on 15 February 2011 and was the first cat there given the official title Chief Mouser, according to GOV.UK.

Cats in art and literature

Artists have always loved how cats move. Around 1517–18, Leonardo da Vinci drew a sheet of more than twenty cats and lions sleeping, prowling, playing and fighting, with a dragon added for good measure. It is in the Royal Collection: Cats, lions, and a dragon.

Writers gave cats some of their best characters:

• Puss in Boots became famous through Charles Perrault’s 1697 tale, in which a clever cat tricks an ogre and wins his master a fortune.
• The Cheshire Cat grins, vanishes and reappears in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The phrase “grin like a Cheshire cat” is older than the book.

Famous cartoon and film cats

Tom of Tom and Jerry first appeared, under the name Jasper, in the 1940 MGM short Puss Gets the Boot, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. The series barely uses dialogue: the chase is the joke. Several of its shorts won Academy Awards, as Britannica notes.

Garfield, Jim Davis’s lazy, lasagna-loving orange cat, started as a syndicated newspaper strip on 19 June 1978. Britannica calls it one of the most widely syndicated comic strips in history.

Puss in Boots made the jump too, from Perrault’s page to the Shrek films and his own animated movies.

Internet cats

The internet made ordinary house cats famous overnight. The best-known is Tardar Sauce, better known as Grumpy Cat, whose permanently cross face went viral after a photo was posted on Reddit in September 2012. She died in May 2019, and her face is still a staple of memes.

More of the internet’s best-known cats are in famous cat memes.

Today: the cats still waiting in shelters

For all the gold collars and comic strips, most cats in history were simply working animals and strays. That is still true. Shelters around the world look after cats who need homes, vet care and food.

One of them is Pink Paw (Rožinė pėdutė), a cat shelter in Kaunas, Lithuania, and the shelter behind our games. You can read about the shelter, and how its payouts from Token Tails can be checked, in Pink Paw: the Kaunas cat shelter behind Token Tails. If you would like to do something for cats near you, start with our guide to stray cats.

Or meet a pixel cat of your own at /game. It is free, and you do not need to sign up to start.