From that time the mouse has been timid and has hidden in
holes."
In the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum there is an excellent
painting of a tabby cat assisting a man to capture birds. Hieroglyphic
inscriptions as far back as 1684 B.C. mention the cat, and there is at
Leyden a tablet of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty with a cat
seated under a chair. A temple at Beni-Hassan is dedicated to Pasht or
Bubastis, the goddess of cats, which is as old as Thothmes IV of the
eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B.C.; and the cat appears in written rituals of
that dynasty. Herodotus tells of the almost superstitious reverence
which dwellers along the Nile felt for the cat, and gravely states that
when one died a natural death in any house, the inmates shaved their
eyebrows as a token of grief; also, that in case of a fire the first
thing they saved was the household cat. Fortunate pussies!
It is thought that cats were introduced into Greece from Egypt, although
Professor Rolleston, of Cambridge University, believes the Grecian pet
cat to have been the white-breasted marten. Yet why should he? Is not a
soft, white-breasted maltese or tabby as attractive? The idea that cats
were domesticated in Western Europe by the Crusaders is thought to be
erroneous; but pet cats were often found in nunneries in the Middle
Ages, and Pope Gregory the Great, toward the end of the sixth century,
had a pet cat of which he was very fond.
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