Chapter 1: Part 2:
history of the cat

Astonishingly little is known about the history of the cat. While her path has paralleled man's for thousands of years, he has noted few milestones in their journey together. For this it seems reasonable to blame the cat.

Man has always been a fairly close observer of the world around him and an incurable diarist. If the ancestral cat does not appear in cave drawings or on clay tablets, it is very possibly because then, as now, she walked alone and seldom came when called. Out of sight, out of mind.

There is an Arab myth that the cat came into being on Noah's Ark when one of the two lions sneezed and the first feline leaped out of his nose. As myths go, this is plausible enough, except that there is no suggestion as to how the premier cat managed to perpetuate the race.

Somewhat more scientific opinion holds that the cat became cat about 40 million years ago. She was not the cat we know today, but she was beginning to be. And she had already come a long way from her starting point: Miacis, a weasel-like creature of the Eocene epoch (40 to 60 million years ago), who is also responsible for bears, raccoons, hyenas, dogs (yet) and civets -- an oddly assorted lot which is not even on speaking terms today.

Cats developed from the civet side of the family, and are also distant cousins of one of the most fearsome beasts of all time, the saber-toothed tiger. Smilodon, the sabertooth, was a 14-foot engine of destruction with curving, six-inch fangs and a mean temper, who strode the earth for half a million years. Since he was padding around throughout the period in which the early apes learned to stand erect and become men, it is possible that he had much to do with the still-lingering human fear of cats.

it started in Egypt

The first tame cats of which anyone knows anything definite showed up in Egypt about 3000 B.C.

They were descended from an African wild cat and were very much like today's house cat in size and proportion. They were short-haired and gray in color, with black stripes and spots on the body and legs. The Egyptians adored them and rarely, if ever, have cats had it so good again. The cats, as always, made friends first with the grain farmers, whose storehouses they protected from rats and mice. This service proved so valuable that eventually the cat was elevated to Egypt's large family of deities. She became Pasht, the Goddess of Light, and was worshipped at temples built in her honor. (The Egyptian word "mau" meant both "cat" and "light.") Cat holidays were celebrated with parades and revelry in the streets. Household cats were adorned with jeweled collars and earrings. Killing a cat became a crime punishable by death. When a cat died it was embalmed, wrapped in burial cloths and buried in a special cat cemetery. Especially solicitous cat owners even embalmed a few mice so that Mau would not go hungry on her journey to the afterworld. Cemeteries discovered by archeologists in the nineteenth century were found to contain hundreds of thousands of cat mummies. And this being a practical era, the mummies were promptly sold by the ton for use as fertilizer. The Egyptians' excessive admiration for the cat eventually played a part in Egypt's downfall. It is said that when the Persian king, Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, was besieging Pelusium in his classic invasion of Egypt, he threw live cats over the wall of the city. This heartless hailstorm of sacred mousers sent the Egyptians into a panic, and while they were distracted and unnerved their stronghold was overrun. Cats and conquerors have rarely got on well together, incidentally, and Cambyses was a typical tyrant in this regard. It is probably too simple to say that mighty monarchs can't stand the cat's bland refusal to take any sort of loyalty or fealty oath, but the fact remains that Alexander the Great and Napoleon were cat-haters and that Louis XVI of France took part in celebrations whose high point was the torturing of cats by burning. How and when cats spread around the world is a matter of conjecture. Apparently, however, their emigration from Egypt began shortly after the Egyptians made it illegal to export them. Phoenician traders are sometimes credited with introducing cats to Italy. And undoubtedly pioneering cats began to jump ship at various ports as soon as their now-traditional friendship with sailors was established. In any event, the cat was known in Greece and Rome before the Christian era. Once on the continent of Europe the Egyptian tabbies evidently mated with the European wild cat, and the progress of the race was assured. The remains of cats have been found at Roman villas in Great Britain. By the fifth century A.D. the cat was comfortably situated in China, and in Scotland and the Netherlands. By the seventh century, the Prophet Mohammed was renowned, among other things, for his fondness for cats, and the legend persists that he once cut the sleeve off a gown he wished to wear rather than disturb the cat sleeping on it. By the tenth century the cat was everywhere and greatly esteemed. In Saxony, Henry the Fowler ruled that anyone who injured a cat should pay a heavy fine. An early Prince of Wales, Howel Dda, enacted laws in 936 which set rates and values for cats of various ages and rat-catching abilities. In the Far East those relentless borrowers, the Japanese, having already obtained their written language from China, added the cat to their list of imports. Mao, as the Chinese called her, was so rare and so expensive at first that the Japanese decided that a cat-killer and his family would live under a curse for seven generations. It appeared that the peaceful, hard-working cat had found her place as man's ally in his endless battle against the marauding mouse and rat. the fall from favor Medieval man, however, whatever his glories, peered at his world through a fog of superstition. He believed that demons and witches walked abroad, and saw their evil hand at work in the misfortunes that befell him. He was also close enough to the earth to believe that nature was inhabited by spirits, hard to please and easy to offend, who could help or harm him. And so he built his cathedrals, aspiring to the one God for whom the new Church spoke, and feared the Devil's legions who showed themselves so often and in so many guises in his daily life. Man's ceaseless struggle with himself is often felt by innocent bystanders, and few such have suffered more brutally than the cat. In Europe, as in Egypt, the cat fared well at first. In time she even became an object of worship. In the German states, particularly, cats became associated with Freya, the goddess of love and fertility -- a sort of north-country Venus -- and a team of them was believed to haul her chariot around Valhalla. Obviously, whoever wove this little fable together had had very little experience with cats. Eventually the rites of the Freya worshippers became outrageous, and a wrathful church cracked down. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII directed the Inquisition to burn the heretics as witches -- and their cats. The human slaughter was appalling. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more than 100,000 witches were executed in Germany alone and another 75,000 in France. With them perished countless thousands of cats. Once the cat was thought to have supernatural powers, no misfortune was too small to blame her for and no means was too severe to exterminate her. The folklore abounded with horror stories, bizarre, incredible and devoutly believed. The normal, night-prowling cat looking for mice became a witch, transformed by incantations to the Devil, and bent on evil errands. She soured milk, spoiled crops, brought illness, caused afflictions. Throughout Europe cats were burned, boiled, impaled, hanged, flayed, gutted, buried alive, dropped from towers, stoned and stabbed with righteous fervor and pious fear. The whole gruesome performance was not only sanctioned but raised to the level of religious significance by being incorporated into the celebration of holy days. Many a Shrove Tuesday, Lenten Sunday and Easter in those times rang with the screams of tortured and dying cats. (It is interesting to note that less than 300 years after her arrival the cat also had fallen from grace in Japan. From being the pampered pet of the rich, she had become an evil demon in legend and folklore.) The survival of the cat seems to have been due to her own resourcefulness and to the courage of her few remaining human friends. For it was literally worth a person's life to own a cat when the murderous frenzy was at its height. Old ladies in particular needed only to keep a cat to convict themselves of witchcraft. Millers and sailors stayed loyal to their small helpers, to some degree; some tough old dames managed to protect their hearthside companions; and writers and statesmen began to be numbered among the folks who traditionally and fundamentally liked cats. Some of these, fortunately, were quite influential. The great political cardinals, Wolsey of England and Richelieu of France, both had a succession of pet cats and were neither bewitched nor bedeviled. It is impossible to estimate how much this kind of support helped, but by the eighteenth century the tide had begun to turn once more in favor of the cat. the cat in America The cat came to America with the colonists, and it seems fair to say that she contributed her share to the civilizing of the wilderness by her never ending war on rodents and vermin. By World War II she was a well-established institution. There was hardly a single military base or depot which did not have its faithful mousers. She worked in factories and shipyards, in air and railroad terminals. Cats accepted for combat duty sailed with the Navy, flew with the Air Force and the Marines, and walked with the troops, who were, however, always described as dogfaces. Individual cats achieved fame by surviving long hours on a life raft after being torpedoed, by being enclosed in packing cases and surviving sea voyages halfway around the world, by being decorated for honorable service to the Allied cause. In the war zones, of course, she again suffered enormous casualties, and her greatest feat was in managing to survive there at all. At survival, to be sure, she has always been expert. She has seen to this by retaining the ability to forage for herself and for her young. It may be less necessary for her to do so these days, but there are few cats foolish enough to forget how to do it. Experience has taught that there are few certainties in a man-sized world. Serenely self-sufficient and magnificently independent, she can reflect -- if she thinks about such things at all -- that her lot generally has improved and is improving. She does not enjoy the adulation that was showered upon her in the good old days in Egypt, but neither is she running for her life before a howling mob bent on doing her in. Her enemies actually are few and quite civilized. Aside from the people who "just don't like cats," there are some bird-lovers, some dog-lovers, the sufferers from cat allergies and perhaps a few mouse-lovers. Meanwhile, the ranks of her friends are growing. The groups which historically have been her companions have been swelled by the tide that sweeps all before it: children. And unofficial observation of suburban America suggests that many families which lack the acreage to keep a dog active and happy are acquiring and enjoying cats. There is, of course, a large uncommitted population which doesn't dislike cats but doesn't like them, either. Perhaps the last vestiges of cat superstition are at work here. Old beliefs die hard, and there still are folks who will say that cats can read the human mind and see things invisible to man. Our language, too, is filled with unfavorable references to cats which long usage has given the ring of truth. The catty person is spiteful and malicious. The cat's-paw is a dupe. The copycat appropriates others' ideas. To pussyfoot is to be evasive, indirect. The catcall is derisive. Only the jazz world has cast a small affirmative vote by coining a term for the alert and knowing person: hep-cat. Generalities -- good or bad -- have never impressed the cat, however. She is an utter realist, no philosopher and very much a she. Considering the swaggering virility of the tomcat there may be room for argument here, but on balance it seems, in human eyes, that the feline personality is feminine. (Only the French, usually so perceptive in these matters, disagree. Le Chat is masculine.) Like most females she is confident of her capacities and aware of her limits. She has no brag or bluster; she never overextends herself. Yet she faces life unflinchingly, knows what she wants and how much she is willing to put up with, or forgo, or insist on, to get it. She is various. She is complex. She is intriguing. She is cat. Go to: Chapter 1 Part 3: Breeds

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