Why Did Ancient Egyptians Worship Cats?

They mostly did not — not in the way the phrase implies. What actually happened is more interesting than cat-worship.

The correction worth making

Egyptians did not, in general, worship cats as gods. They worshipped deities who could take cat form, and they treated living cats as creatures under divine protection — which is a different relationship, and a more coherent one.

The distinction matters because it explains behaviour that otherwise looks irrational: reverence for the animal as a bearer of a goddess's favour, alongside the very unsentimental mass production of cat mummies for votive sale.

It started with grain

Egypt's wealth was stored grain, and stored grain attracts rodents, and rodents attract snakes. Cats killed both. A settlement with cats lost less of its harvest and suffered fewer venomous snakes near its homes.

The current understanding is that domestication was largely self-selecting: African wildcats that tolerated human proximity ate well and out-bred those that did not. Humans did not so much tame cats as offer conditions cats chose to accept.

Genetic work points to two major dispersals of cat lineages, one out of the Near East and a later one associated with Egypt, spreading along trade and shipping routes.

From useful to sacred

An animal that protects your food supply and kills the snakes near your children acquires meaning quickly. Attach that to a protective goddess and you have Bastet: the household guardian whose earthly emblem sits on your roof.

How seriously they took it

Killing a cat, even accidentally, is reported to have carried severe penalty. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, claims to have witnessed a Roman kill a cat in Egypt and be lynched by a crowd, despite official attempts to intervene.

Herodotus reports that in a house fire people were more concerned with the cats than the fire, and that a household in mourning for a dead cat would shave their eyebrows.

Both are outsider accounts written to impress a foreign audience with Egyptian strangeness, so allow for exaggeration. But two independent Greek writers reporting the same intensity is worth something.

The mummies

Millions of animal mummies were produced, cats prominent among them. These were mostly votive offerings — bought by pilgrims and dedicated to a deity, functioning rather like a candle lit in a church.

In the nineteenth century, enormous quantities of Egyptian cat mummies were shipped to England and ground up for agricultural fertiliser. It is a grim footnote, and it is why fewer survive than were made.

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