The Cat in Hieroglyphs: Miw and the Serpent-Slayer

The Egyptian word for cat was written with a seated feline and pronounced roughly 'miw' — which is, quite plainly, the noise the animal makes.

Named after its own voice

The Egyptian word was written with consonants transliterated mjw or miw, conventionally vocalised as 'miu' or 'meeoo'. The feminine, for a female cat, is mjt / miit.

Egyptian script did not record most vowels, so the exact sound is reconstruction. But the consonant skeleton is unmistakably imitative: the cat is named for its call. It is among the earliest recorded examples of a species named onomatopoeically, roughly four thousand years ago, and the same instinct produced the modern 'meow'.

How it was written

Egyptian writing combined sound-signs with a determinative — a silent picture at the end of a word telling you what category it belonged to. For miw, that determinative is a seated cat in profile. The reader gets the sounds, then a small picture confirming which sort of thing is meant.

Cats in tomb painting

Cats appear throughout Egyptian domestic art with a consistency that is hard to fake. They sit beneath chairs — very often beneath the wife's chair — sometimes collared, sometimes eating, sometimes tethered. They accompany owners on marsh-hunting scenes among the papyrus.

These are not devotional images. They are pictures of a household, and the cat is in them because the cat was there.

The cat that kills the serpent

The most consequential image is not domestic. In Spell 17 of the Book of the Dead, a great cat is shown beneath the sacred ished (persea) tree at Heliopolis, knife in paw, killing the serpent Apep — chaos itself. Commentary embedded in the spell identifies that cat with Ra.

Cat versus serpent, order versus chaos, repeated nightly and never finally won. That is the oldest ancestor of every cat-hero story since — and it is, taken literally, the plot of the game on this site.

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