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Bedtime Wonders

Writer's pictureDiana Ross Sumalinog

Ancient Egypt Mummified Felines


Are you fond of cats? Cause I am. I have seven cats in my house; 4 of them were adopted—names' Porschia, Malfoy, Marshall, Ursula, Shalani, Ceo, and Sky. I'm a cat person since I was a kid. My mom sometimes scolds me when I play with cats cause, you know, I have asthma, and the pet's fur might trigger it. But do you know that in ancient Egypt, not only people were mummified but also cats?


Mummified Cats

In Ancient Egypt, felines were preserved and covered with gems, and hurting a cat was an offense that could be rebuffed with death.


The Ancient Egyptian religion was a tremendously mind-boggling arrangement of polytheistic convictions that included expound folklore and countless gods.

Large numbers of the gods were regularly addressed as creatures:

  • The funerary god Anubis was portrayed as a jackal.

  • Hathor, the goddess of fruitfulness, was frequently described as a cow.

  • Horus, the lord of sky and authority and perhaps the main antiquated Egyptian gods, was generally portrayed as an ornamented hawk.

Creatures' importance stretched out past addressing the divine beings; they were a vital piece of Egyptian culture and society.

Egyptian Cat

Felines were particularly preferred by the old Egyptians. They were viewed as holy as the goddess Bastet's exemplification, who addressed assurance, parenthood, and ripeness.


Trained felines were basic in families across the realm: Noblemen thought about them as images of abundance, status, and effortlessness, and standard people adulated their capacity to execute venomous snakes and get vermin far from storehouses. Hurting a feline was viewed as an actual offense that was culpable even by death.

Various old Egyptian felines were embalmed and covered alongside different gems. Many preserved cats were shown at other sanctuaries the nation over. Notwithstanding, some heartless and tricky business visionaries of antiquated Egypt exploited how felines were viewed as consecrated.

They bred felines, possibly to slaughter them when they arrived at maturity. They did this to preserve the cats and offer them to clerics, travelers, and other people who wished to embellish their own sanctum with a genuine preserved creature.


Such remorseless business was likely the foundation story of the biggest mass grave of embalmed felines at any point found. In 1888, a rancher was delving a well in the desert outside of Beni Hasan's town, around a hundred miles from Egypt's capital city of Cairo.



Around then, Beni Hasan's territory was known for a few burial places of aristocrats of old Egypt, including the burial place of Amenemhat, the central minister during the reign of pharaoh Senusret I in the twentieth century B.C. In any case, the rancher didn't anticipate that his digging should uncover a secret underground burial place that contained upwards of 80,000 preserved felines.


The Farmer's revelation before long pulled in various local people who overflowed the site looking for assets. They don't discover anything except for a feline-measured bronze stone coffin and some gems, so they began offering the embalmed felines to whoever would get them. Since these feline mummies were seen as useless at that point, the more significant part of them was sold at a nominal cost.


Some were offered to individuals across Egypt who kept them as gifts. Countless them were provided to a nearby hire who supposedly ground them up and utilized them to make compost and paint.



Black Egyptian Cat Statue

However, nine tons of preserved feline remaining parts were moved to Liverpool. They were sold at two sales coordinated by a sale house named Gordon and Co. During the auction sale, the salesperson supposedly utilized a feline skull as his bartering hammer. Since numerous individuals from the British high society regarded the tremendous estimation of antiquated Egyptian social legacy, the more significant part of the Beni Hasan feline mummies was purchased by Egyptologists, authorities of artifacts, and different exhibition delegates halls. A massive load of old feline remaining parts might have been bought at a nominal cost of 17 pounds, which is comparable to somewhat more than $2,000 in new terms.



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