Cats in antiquity

[carolinw]

Been doing some research on pets in ancient Rome and beyond.  Now dogs were pets for a long time, and so were cats.  As a cat lover myself, I got curiouser and curioser :-)  I knew about the affinity of the Egyptians with cats, but learned that the Romans associated them with liberty, loved them around for their mouse/rat catching skills (cats

Comments

[yakalskovich]

Oh! That thing about Romans and cats is good and useful to know. 'Associated with liberty' indeed...

[carolinw]

Another interesting tidbit about cats - when the great eradication of cats reached its height, the rats took over in Europe, as their natural predator wasn't there anymore. Result? The big plagues. Then lots of people died and the survivors had other things to do than kill cats. The cat population rebounded, killed rats, and the plagues ended. Then, naturally, people killed cats again... until about the 18th century in Europe when cats became desirable again.

[yakalskovich]

It seems humans actually need cats if they live in larger-scale agricultural or industrial settings. What you say makes perfect sense.

So, in a way, the Black Death would have been a man-made disaster. Of course, the stores of grain and other food that people would keep around their settlements attracted rats, rats had fleas, and with no rat-catchers, there would be rat flea-born plagues.

All civilisation since the Neolithic Revolution could be viewed as one long game of trial and error, with some rather large systemic failures from time to time, when there had been small errors causing large-scale effects.

One just has to look at the mess our world is in today...

[carolinw]

What amazes me is that humanity - also by trial and error - managed to survive and advance. Been doing some research on dysentery (need that for the siege of Rome by Witichis), and people had fortunately figured out (already in 2000 BC!) that boiling water could purify it, so managed to survive those water/food borne diseases.

I think I'll have Totila get sick and nursed back to health by Teja....

[essayel]

I've been doing some background reading about the Greek settlements around the Black Sea in the 5th=3rd century BC and whereas dog bones are fairly plentiful only one domestic feline bone has been discovered. That seems really odd to me because they must have had some contact with Egypt and have seen the benefits.

Or perhaps there were cats there and for some reason their bones just haven't turned up? They say that ALL the remains for the Neanderthals would fit on one small table.

[essayel]

Linked here by yakalskovich, btw.

[carolinw]

Well, from what I've read, the Greeks and the Phoenicians actually were the most active when it came to stealing cats from Egypt, and that happened around 500 BC and earlier. The cats they stole then had litters, and they actually sold them around the Mediterranean up into what then was Gaul.

From what I've read, the cat population actually was pretty hefty in classical Greek/Roman times.

[essayel]

Maybe that's Greece Greek and the Pontic trading posts' trade in moggies was as luxury goods. The semi-nomadic tribes beyond the pale certainly loved cat-shaped ornaments and somewhere in this video there is a delightful kitty cat - I can't remember which bit of the film it is though [also I speak neither Russian nor French so I'm not quite sure what was going on but the pictures are nice].

This is my favourite though. Romano-Celtic dated to the 1st century AD. The Welsh had a keen appreciation of cats and in Hwyel Dda Laws of the ninth century, when a couple had a no fault divorce by mutual agreement, the woman could take her pick of the family cats as part of her portion.