Pets Enjoyed Lofty Perch in Pharaohs’ Day

Prince Tuthmosis’ cat Mit sits forever before a table piled high with loaves of bread, a duck and a few beef ribs topped with lotus flowers.

Another ancient Egyptian, the nobleman Ptahmosis, holds the wooden scepters of office while a monkey tethered beneath his chair kicks up a foot in delight and plucks a grape from a bunch it is holding.

The scenes are from tomb carvings in which the ancients immortalized not only sacred animals but also their pets. A few pets were even mummified and buried after death.

“Pets were very common,” said Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist leading a drive to create a room at the Egyptian Museum to house some 150 mummified cats, crocodiles, falcons, dogs, fish, snakes and baboons. The animals were mostly offerings to the gods.

The museum has accepted the idea, but Ikram will have to find private financing for the project, which could cost up to $200,000. She has lectured in Egypt and even at the University of Michigan to press for donations, and she plans to approach American and European pet food companies.

Ikram said ancient Egypt was “an economically stable society that could afford to have pets.”

Noblemen raised cats, monkeys and dogs, while pharaohs kept hunting dogs and lions, with which they are sometimes pictured in fierce scenes from the hunt.

“We don’t have cuddly pharaohs,” Ikram said. “We have pharaohs smiting and hunting and being blessed by the gods.”

Hunting dogs were not unusual in the Old Kingdom, which began some 4,500 years ago. Cats were first domesticated around 2000 B.C. and were apparently used at first to chase rodents.

“I would imagine it started because the animals were useful, but gradually, the role became more varied,” said Jaromir Malek of Oxford University in England and the author of “The Cat in Ancient Egypt.”

“We certainly know that there were a large number of pets in the richer households,” he said.

Khou, a nobleman from Assiut, was painted on the side of his wooden coffin holding a long white leash and walking a big white dog with black spots similar to a Saluki. The dog’s name, Meniou-pu--ancient Egyptian for “he is a shepherd”--is written in hieroglyphics above its image.

Intef II, a nobleman from Thebes, is pictured in a stone carving with his hunting dogs: Behkai, Bakir, Phet and a fourth dog whose name is not legible. The hieroglyphics state that Behkai was good at hunting oryxes and Phet was adept at catching birds.

“There was probably a blurred line in ancient Egypt between what was an actual pet and what was an outdoor animal that . . . people may have fed,” said Denise Doxey of the Egyptian section at the University of Pennsylvania’s museum.

There was clearer evidence of pets during the New Kingdom, which began around 1550 B.C. and was marked by great wealth and power under such leaders as Ramses II.

Tomb paintings from the New Kingdom feature several frivolous scenes of cats, including very fat cats and cats wearing earrings and necklaces.

“These animals simply don’t look like very efficient hunters of mice,” Malek said.

Hundreds of thousands of cats were mummified in late Pharaonic times as offerings to Bastet, a goddess representing maternity and protection often depicted with a human body and a feline face. But only about half a dozen pet mummies have been discovered.

Egyptologists disagree as to why.

Some, such as Ikram, say the ancient Egyptians loved their animals too much to have them killed by snapping their necks, as was done with some of the cats mummified as offerings to Bastet.

Others say some of the many cat mummies in cemeteries dedicated to the maternity goddess may actually be pets.

It is not clear whether ancient Egyptians believed in an animal afterlife. But Doxey notes the names of pets on some tombs and says it shows that their owners wanted to help bring the animals into the afterlife with them.

“Putting someone’s name in a tomb is a way of giving them immortality,” she said.