Why Egyptians Mummified Cats

They are found not one by one, but in vast numbers. In the catacombs of Saqqara, Bubastis, and Beni Hasan, bundles lay by the thousands, layer upon layer. The main wave ran from about the 7th century BCE to the first centuries CE: the Late Period, Ptolemaic era, and Roman Egypt, when pilgrimage to temples became widespread.

The logic was simple. The cat was the animal of the goddess Bastet, and elsewhere of lion-headed goddesses such as Pakhet. For a request to reach them, you needed a messenger, and a mummy worked like a letter: the body was preserved, so the animal's spirit could travel on and deliver it. A pilgrim came to the temple, received a ready-made mummy, and a priest placed it in a catacomb - request sent. The whole cycle revolved around this: cats were bred and raised at the temple, killed at the right time, embalmed, and wrapped.

Pets were embalmed too, but that was rare. The best known is the cat Ta-miu, beloved pet of Prince Thutmose: a stone sarcophagus with inscriptions was carved for her. The difference is obvious: a pet has an individual coffin and a name, while an offering has wrappings and a communal pit.

Today, mummies are not unwrapped but scanned. When more than 800 Egyptian animal bundles in Manchester were examined with X-rays and CT scans, the picture was varied.

Calling this a fake is the easiest answer, but researchers themselves do not see it that way. More likely, bundles held anything connected to the sacred animal: bedding, shells, sand from the enclosure. For a believer, that may have been enough. Deceiving the buyer cannot be ruled out either: you cannot read intent from a bundle.

What is clear is the scale. The cats are almost always young, and some have displaced cervical vertebrae, read as a sign of deliberate killing. The animals were not waited for but supplied to meet demand: this was temple-based production, not a cemetery.

It ended in keeping with how it began. In 1890, a shipment of cat mummies found near Beni Hasan was brought to Liverpool and auctioned off as fertilizer - English fields were manured with what had been carefully placed in Egyptian catacombs. Museums took a few mummies; the rest went into the ground.