Miss Cuddlywumps unpacks a nursery rhyme
Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the moon.
The little Dog laughed,
To see such sport,
And the Dish ran away with
the Spoon.
What
does this children’s rhyme have to do with cats in history? Perhaps quite a
lot, as it turns out, and that history goes all the way back to ancient Egypt.
The
Egyptians did not have fiddles (as far as I know), but they did have a musical
instrument called a sistrum. The sistrum
was a jingly bronze percussion instrument that I imagine might have sounded
something like a tambourine. It had a handle and a curved frame with bronze
rods strung across it. The rods jingled when the sistrum was shaken. (This will
make more sense if you look at the picture below of Bastet holding a sistrum.)
Now
you may be wondering why I wrote a whole paragraph about an instrument that
seems to have absolutely nothing to do with a fiddle, a cat, a cow, or the moon.
Well, I do have a reason, and here it is:
 |
|
The
goddess Bastet and her sistrum
By
Gunkarta (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via
Wikimedia Commons.
|
The
sistrum was often associated with Hathor, the great Egyptian mother goddess and
goddess of fertility who was often portrayed as a cow. Many ancient sistrums
have an image of Hathor in the handle. The instrument’s curved frame is said to
represent the moon, and its sound was associated with fertility, which has long
been associated with cats (we cats have astounding reproductive powers). Many
of the instruments had figures of cats along the frame or at the top of the handle.
Also, archaeologists have found statuettes of the cat-headed goddess Bastet
holding her sistrum, and those statuettes look a lot like a cat playing a
fiddle. Bastet, the protector of pregnant women, loved music, so it makes sense
that she would shake a sistrum. According to some sources, Bastet and her
sistrum morphed over time into a cat and a fiddle, an image that sometimes
appeared in medieval religious contexts.
So
now we have a possible explanation for the cat and the fiddle and the cow
jumping over the moon, but what does it all mean? Why is the dog laughing and
how can a dish and a spoon run anywhere? Well, gentle readers, I hate to admit
it, but I do not know. I suspect this rhyme is mostly meant for nonsensical
fun, which you humans seem to do so much of.
[She
of Little Talent reminds me to tell you that information for this post came
from Donald Engels’ excellent book Classical
Cats (1999).]
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