Miss Cuddlywumps muses on miu
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| Miu: Swamp cat (Felis chaus). |
When it came to naming different kinds of cats, ancient
Egyptians were not very specific. In hieroglyphic writing, all cats are called miu, or mii, or miit for a
female. Whether it was an African wild cat, a swamp cat, or a domestic cat, it
was a miu. This is sort of like calling
domestic cats, lions, and jaguars “meow” in English.
We at first thought this was a little bit lazy of the Egyptians.
Surely they could think of unique terms for what were obviously different species?
But then we realized that the Egyptians didn’t categorize animals according to
the modern genus, species, subspecies system.
To them, the heavily built wild creature
that had long, tufted ears and liked swampy areas (swamp cat) was a cat; the
smaller wild creature with the long, dark-ringed tail (African wild cat) was a
cat; the friendly creature that had quick, bright eyes, a long tail, and that
killed rodents and scorpions in their homes was a cat. Maybe on some level the
Egyptians distinguished between them, but not in their hieroglyphs.
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| Miu: African wild cat (Felis silvestris lybica). |
And that brings me to names for cats. I am talking now about
the individual kitty cats that may have been pets in people’s homes.
Did
ancient Egyptians name their domesticated cats anything other than miu or miit? Was there some equivalent of Fluffy or Princess or Fang and
we just don’t know it because it was either never written down or that writing has
not survived? Or was the cat-human relationship more impersonal in those times
(in, say, the second millennium BC), so that even domesticated cats did not
need their own names?
I’m sorry to have raised more questions than I answered, but
sometimes the past is a puzzle!
For more on miu, see "How to Write 'Cat' in Egyptian Hieroglyphs."
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Miu: Domestic cat (Felis
catus).
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Source
Malek, Jaromir. The
Cat in Ancient Egpyt. Rev ed. London: British Museum Press, 2006.
Photo credits
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