Cats in Art: An Old Woman with Cat by Max Liebermann

Wordless Wednesday

An Old Woman with Cat

1878.

Oil on canvas by German artist Max Liebermann (1847–1935).

Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Book Review of “Look Both Ways” by Carol J. Perry

Miss Cuddlywumps reads the latest from the Witch City Mystery series

We were delighted to get to visit Salem, Massachusetts, once more by way of Carol J. Perry’s Witch City Mystery series. This installment is titled Look Both Ways, and it is (as we  knew it would be) another winner.

To start off, our favorite redhead, Maralee “Lee” Barrett, is working on furnishing her new apartment in her aunt Ibby’s house after losing everything in a fire. She is lucky enough to find a bureau exactly like one she used to have. And when I say “lucky,” I mean extraordinarily lucky, because this is one unique piece of furniture: only three like it were ever made, it has some interesting secret compartments—and it came from the site of a notorious murder. At least that’s what antiques dealer Shea Tolliver tells her, wondering if Lee will be bothered by the murder connection. But Lee has never even heard of the Helena Trent murder, so who cares if it came from there?

Well, pretty soon Lee starts to care. Like after she finds Shea murdered in her own shop, and after she starts seeing strange visions in the bureau’s blackened mirror, and after she finds out about the missing pink diamond that someone might want badly enough to kill for—and which someone might think is concealed in one of the bureau’s secret compartments.

But let’s back up to those visions for a moment. Lee is a very interesting person, and one of her most interesting attributes is that she is a “scryer” or “gazer,” meaning she can see things in shiny objects, and I am not talking about her reflection. Lee sees visions, and in this case she sees a woman and dog that might be connected to the Helena Trent murder. Is scrying a gift or curse? Something to reveal to her boyfriend, police detective Pete Mondello, or to hide from him? Lee is still deciding on those questions.

There are several questions in this book, the big ones (besides Lee’s personal scrying/boyfriend issues) being Who killed Shea Tolliver? and Where is Helena Trent’s pink diamond? I have a third question, which is, Why do all those cats keep hanging around on the fence?

Let’s take the questions in order. As to who killed Shea Tolliver, it could have been her former business partner, or it might have been the man convicted of Helena Trent’s murder (who was also Helena’s husband and has conveniently just been released from prison), or it could have been Helena Trent’s stepson. It very well might have had something to do with that pink diamond, which brings us to our second question: Where is it?

Well, I’m not going to tell you that, so let’s skip to the third question: What’s up with the cats?

Actually, I’m not going to tell you that either, exactly. But the question reminds me that I have gotten this far into the review and have not even introduced O’Ryan, the big yellow-striped cat who used to live with an actual witch and may have been her familiar. Now he lives with Lee, and boy, is it ever a good thing. As for O’Ryan and those cats on the fence and in other places, let’s just say Lee really needs them.

Look Both Ways is the perfect kind of cozy. It’s got a cast of characters that almost walk off the page, a mystery that will twist your mind in knots, a little romance, a dash of magic… Carol J. Perry has given us another great read.

Highly recommended!

What Ancient Egyptians Meant When They Said “Cat”

Miss Cuddlywumps muses on miu

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.

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."

Miu: Domestic cat (Felis catus).

Source

Malek, Jaromir. The Cat in Ancient Egpyt. Rev ed. London: British Museum Press, 2006.

Photo credits
Swamp cat photo by Petra Karstedt / Wilfried Berns [CC BY-SA 2.0 de], via Wikimedia Commons.
African wild cat Illustration by Donovan Reginald Rosevear in The Carnivores of West Africa (1974). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Domestic cat photo by Photo by Lisafern [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.