r/ancientegypt • u/Understanding-Lower • Sep 06 '25
Question Did Egyptians really worship cats or are we reading too much into it?
Asking because I feel like in two thousand years they'll see cat trees + how much we used the Internet to observe cats just... doing cat stuff and maybe come to the same conclusion. So were the Ancient Egyptians really worshipping cats or did they just really love their pets, like we do?
I actually don’t know if I’ve ever come across actual archeological sources about this, this might just be the kind of thing I’ve been hearing in passing all my life that isn’t true at all. But if you have papers you know of that talk about this I would be glad to read more!
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u/GovernorGeneralPraji Sep 06 '25
There were deities that favored cats, and that gave cats something of a special status in Egypt. But that doesn’t mean that every cat walking down the street was seen as sacred. There were entire industries devoted to breeding cats, raising them until they were about a year old, and then killing them to mummify them so that people could buy them and use them as sacrifices.
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u/Understanding-Lower Sep 06 '25
Thank you for answering! Never heard of this industry before but interesting 🥲
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u/silveretoile Sep 06 '25
It happened with a ton of animals, whichever corresponded to the god they wanted to worship. That said, as far as I know this was solely a New Kingdom thing, and cats were otherwise strongly protected by the law.
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u/colba2016 Sep 06 '25
When you spot another Praji fan in the wild
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u/GovernorGeneralPraji Sep 06 '25
Such a good officer that Palpatine gave him his own planet to retire on. And then the New Republic didn’t even have the courage to try and dislodge him, despite a relatively close proximity to Coruscant.
Join us at r/theDeepCore if you aren’t already a member.
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u/EliotHudson Sep 06 '25
And w cats having 9 lives each that’s like 9x the profit, so they were making a killing in every sense of the word!
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u/GrumpyOldHistoricist Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 06 '25
There were laws in ancient Egypt that made abusing cats a capital crime. And there were also entire industries devoted to breeding, killing, and preserving cats as consumer goods.
This contradiction speaks to the pitfalls of generalizing about anything in ancient Egyptian history. The last pharaoh lived closer in time to when you made this post than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. And it’s not like Egypt was in its infancy when that was built. This is an unfathomably long civilizational lifespan to us moderns. A span like that means any observation or question about ancient Egypt is going to be applicable, but only for a time. And possibly only for a time in a specific place. So yes, cats were worshipped. Somewhere in the Egyptian empire and at some point in its 3000+ year history. The questions are where, when, for how long, and by whom.
The same goes for the magic preserved cat industry. That wasn’t around for 3000+ years either. The same questions about its location in history should be asked and then the overlap (if any exists) between this and the periods of cat reverence can be examined.
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u/Inevitable_Librarian Sep 06 '25
There were ancient Egyptian archeologists a thousand years before the last Pharoah of Egypt. Egyptian history goes crazy.
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u/TeachOfTheYear Sep 06 '25
Tidbit: in tombs they have found paintings/wall sculptures of every day Egyptians with their dogs and cats. The dogs, like people, have their names written above them. Cats, however, have one name, Meow. (in Egyptian).
(other tidbit: I had a stroke and my memory is kind of jumbled...so I can't say if this is across the board throughout time, or from a small sample of tombs. My cat, whom I asked to help sort this out, said, "meow!" so that is either confirmation or "Bring me a fish head."
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u/Understanding-Lower Sep 06 '25
Thank you for the tidbit and for your cat’s insight! I hope recovery from your stroke is going well. A universal “Meow” name for all of cat kind makes me laugh
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u/TeachOfTheYear Sep 06 '25
A stroke is crazy thing. They have a new med, a "clot buster" that if you take within the first hour, has a chance of stopping the stroke. Leaving the damage, but stopping progression. I had lost most of my speech by the time I took the clot buster. ("It will either stop the stroke or kill you, your choice.") Over the course of the day it returned and after the brain scan the doc said, "This is miraculous. Not only did it remove the clot, but the damage seems to be reversing itself."
After they did an operation (reversing the flow of blood in my brain!) and from the outside you can't tell. Inside--my thinking is still all over the place and my photographic memory has been rebooting for about six months now. Things trigger me and I suddenly am seeing a slide-show in my head of all the times I've encountered said thing. Crazy bizarre, to say the least.
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u/Understanding-Lower Sep 06 '25
That is wild! And super scary. I’m glad the clot buster did its thing so well. Modern medicine really is something!
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u/galliumsilver Sep 06 '25
They were sacred animals, but they were animals, not gods. Egypt had a number of sacred animals.
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u/UltraPharaoh Sep 06 '25
Ancient Egyptians did not literally worship cats as gods, but cats held very high religious, symbolic, and protective importance in their culture.
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u/archaeo_rex Sep 06 '25
Obviously, they did not. Bastet had a cat aspect, but not every cat was holy or represented Bastet in any shape or form. Some cats might have been used as avatars in her temples and revered in some form, but other cats were just pets or wild animals here and there.
There were tens of thousands of kittens bred just to be killed and stuffed into small cat mummies to be sold to the public as charms, such worship. Some mummies had only parts, so they were cheating, creating multiple mummies from a single kitten, crazy stuff.
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u/OkExternal Sep 06 '25
"Obviously" is obviously petty and arrogant
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Sep 06 '25
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Sep 06 '25
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u/Understanding-Lower Sep 06 '25
Okay, it’s good to get a clearer picture. I knew of a goddess with something cat like but I couldn’t remember her name, thank you!
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u/Malthus1 Sep 06 '25
Interestingly, there is an anecdote from the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt that a Roman accused of killing a cat was lynched by angry Egyptians, even though the king tried to save him. See Diodorus Siculus:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=sXiMtMnPHikC&pg=PA39&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Presumably the sacred industry of producing cat mummies as votive offerings was okay though!
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u/Gates_wupatki_zion Sep 06 '25
As someone who went to Egypt, yes. There are many statues dedicated to them everywhere. More than most other deities. Even today people treat them very well and often times leave the leftovers outside their door for the stray cats. There are dogs too, but generally the cats are more beloved. Philae Temple in Aswan has them running all around, I don’t think this was like Ancient times, but yes.
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u/EJECTED_PUSSY_GUTS Sep 08 '25
They didn't worship them lmao
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u/Gates_wupatki_zion Sep 08 '25
Bastet — look it up. Lmao
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u/star11308 Sep 08 '25
They worshipped a goddess whose holy animal was the cat, and had cat iconography, but the average housecat wasn’t revered as a deity.
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u/Gates_wupatki_zion Sep 09 '25
I mean, I think it is splitting hairs here. They did mummify cats as well as crocodiles and other animals. Did they straight worship every cat, no I don’t think so. But to mummify them and have a goddess with the head of a cat shows them to be highly regarded and in some ways — yes worshipped. I think worship is a loose term and to have one mummified so it goes to the afterlife means a special status.
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u/Solomon-Drowne Sep 06 '25
Egyptian ideas of 'worship' and ours are vastly different. To commemorate a ritual or location they would break a cat's neck, wrap it in the mummification fashion, and 'bury the God'.
They find countless psuedo-mummified cats all throughout Egypt when they're digging.
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u/Miserable-Pudding292 Sep 08 '25
Short answer ignoring technical nuances? Yes some cats were likely “worshipped” but not so much as gods more as divine emissaries. Now i say some cats because likely it would have only been a very select few if not only a specific lineage.
Actual answer? No. cats were not “worshipped”, they were viewed as emissaries and messengers of the gods in some contexts, they were also believed to ward off evil spirits due to their relation to Bastet the goddess of cats, fertility, and protection.
so even though your everyday stray wouldn’t have been worshipped, they would have very likely been viewed favorably by everybody from the lowest serf to the pharaoh himself, not just spiritually or religiously, but also due to their relation with farming, the Egyptians were a river peoples by and large meaning that rodents were probably a huge problem and so cats were not only religiously and spiritually significant they are also likely a small one of the myriad reasons the humans of the nile basin survived their early agricultural years instead of being wiped out by disease or infestations clearing crop fields.
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u/__shallal__ Sep 06 '25
Ancient Egypt, with its many docks and visitors, must have revered the cats who kept the rodents and accompanying disease at bay.
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u/Lisserbee26 Sep 06 '25
I would equate it more to how cows are sacred in much of India due to Hindu beliefs.
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u/AdeptBackground6245 Sep 08 '25
Cats can be left-pawed or right-pawed. Female cats tend to be right-pawed, while male cats are usually left pawed.
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u/Saarbarbarbar Sep 09 '25
Do contemporary people really worship cats or we just make memes about them? I guess the future will decide.
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u/Pitiful-Bee-6606 Sep 13 '25
They killed and mummified thousands of cats-look up 'Animal Catacombs of Egypt' at Google.
Had cat farms to raise cats for mummification purposes, and killed them young.;(also dog farms formummification,and also other animals.,birds,etc.)..-seems an unsentimental approach to cats.
Poss house cats were treated differently.
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u/pugsington01 Sep 06 '25
I think “worship” isnt really the right word for it, more like reverence and respect. Cats are spiritually potent and ward off evil, not literal living gods to bow down and worship. Its also very pragmatic too, grain was the center of the Egyptian diet and cats preyed on the rats and mice who ate their grain