The cultural depiction of cats and their relationship to humans is old and stretches back over 9,500 years. Cats are featured in the history of many nations, are the subject of legend, and are a favourite subject of artists and writers.

History

While the exact history of human interaction with cats is still somewhat vague, a shallow grave site discovered in 1983 in Cyprus, dating to 7500 BCE, during the Neolithic period, contains the skeleton of a human, buried ceremonially with stone tools, a lump of iron oxide, and a handful of seashells. In its own tiny grave from the human grave was an eight-month-old cat, its body oriented in the same westward direction as the human skeleton. Cats are not native to Cyprus. This is evidence that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.

The lineage of today's cats stems from about 4500 BC and came from Europe and Southeast Asia according to a recent study. Modern cats stem from two major lines of lineage.

Near East

Ancient Egypt

Cats, known in ancient Egypt as the mau, played a large role in ancient Egyptian society. They were associated with the goddesses Isis and Bastet. Cats were sacred animals, and the goddess Bastet was often depicted in cat form, sometimes taking on the war-like aspect of a lioness. Killing a cat was forbidden, and the Greek historian Herodotus reports that when a household cat died, the family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. Dead cats were taken to the city of Bubastis, where they were embalmed and buried in designated repositories.

Egyptian hieroglyphics have a character for cat:

Mesopotamia

In ancient Mesopotamian civilisations, including Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria, cats were used primarily for pest control in domestic and agricultural settings. Zooarchaeological evidence documents the presence of domestic cats in the Near East by the late second millennium BCE. Unlike in Egypt, cats were not objects of formal cult worship, though they appear to have been tolerated in domestic contexts.

Levant

In the ancient Levant, including Canaanite, Phoenician, and Israelite cultures, cats are attested mainly in domestic contexts. Archaeological remains from Levantine settlements indicate their presence in areas associated with food storage and trade. Cats are largely absent from surviving religious iconography and mythological texts.

Anatolia

Evidence from Anatolia indicates familiarity with domestic cats during the Hittite period and later eras. References to cats are infrequent in textual and material sources, suggesting their use was limited to practical domestic functions such as pest control.

Persia

In traditional Zoroastrianism, cats are considered impure animals created by the evil spirit Ahriman. Unlike dogs, which are revered as sacred beings and objects of veneration, cats are viewed differently. In Pahlavi texts (such as the Bundahishn), cats—along with other predators and vermin—are often described as evil creations intended to harm the creation of the good god Ahura Mazda. As nocturnal predators, cats are associated with treachery and impurity (nakhshu). Killing this animals is considered a virtuous act, a form of combating evil. Attitudes toward cats in Persia changed only with the arrival of Islam.

In ancient Persia, particularly during the Achaemenid period, cats were present in domestic environments. Although cats held no formal role in Zoroastrian religious practice, they were tolerated within households. Later Persian literary and artistic traditions, including illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnameh, depict domestic cats, reflecting their continued presence in Iranian cultural contexts.

Islam

Although no species are sacred in Islam, cats are revered by Muslims. Some Western writers have stated Muhammad had a favourite cat, Muezza. He is reported to have loved cats so much that, "he would do without his cloak rather than disturb one that was sleeping on it". The story has no origin in early Muslim writers, and seems to confuse a story of a later Sufi saint, Ahmed ar-Rifa'i, centuries after Muhammad.

Western and Central Europe Ancient Greece and Rome

Domestic cats were probably first introduced to Greece and southern Italy in the fifth century BC by the Phoenicians. The earliest unmistakable evidence of the Greeks having domestic cats comes from two coins from Magna Graecia dating to the mid-fifth century BC showing Iokastos and Phalanthos, the legendary founders of Rhegion and Taras respectively, playing with their pet cats.

Housecats seem to have been extremely rare among the ancient Greeks and Romans; the Greek historian Herodotus expressed astonishment at the domestic cats in Egypt, because he had only ever seen wildcats. Even during later times, weasels were far more commonly kept as pets and weasels, not cats, were seen as the ideal rodent-killers. The usual ancient Greek word for "cat" was ailouros, meaning "thing with the waving tail", but this word could also be applied to any of the "various long-tailed carnivores kept for catching mice". Cats are rarely mentioned in ancient Greek literature, but Aristotle does remark in his History of Animals that "female cats are naturally lecherous." The Greek essayist Plutarch linked cats with cleanliness, noting that unnatural odours could make them mad.Plutarch: Adv. on Marr. 44 Pliny linked them with lust,Pliny 10, 83 and Aesop with deviousness and cunning.

The Greeks later syncretised their own goddess Artemis with the Egyptian goddess Bastet, adopting Bastet's associations with cats and ascribing them to Artemis. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the gods flee to Egypt and take animal forms, the goddess Diana (the Roman equivalent of Artemis) turns into a cat. Cats eventually displaced ferrets as the pest control of choice because they were more pleasant to have around the house and were more enthusiastic hunters of mice.

Norse and Celtic mythology In Norse mythology, the goddess Freyja was associated with cats. Farmers sought protection for their crops by leaving pans of milk in their fields for Freya's special feline companions, the two grey cats who fought with her and pulled her chariot.

In Celtic Mythology, a Cat Sith is a fairy cat, sith or sidhe (both pronounced shee) meaning fairy.

Middle Ages During the Middle Ages, many of Artemis' associations with cats were grafted onto the Virgin Mary. Cats are often shown in icons of Annunciation and of the Holy Family and, according to Italian folklore, on the same night that Mary gave birth to Jesus, a cat in Bethlehem gave birth to a kitten.

In Christianity, the patron saint of cats is Saint Gertrude of Nivelles.

Vikings used cats as rat catchers and companions.

An old Irish poem about an author (a monk) and his cat, Pangur Bán, was found in a 9th century manuscript. Pangur Bán, 'White Pangur', is the cat's name, Pangur meaning 'a fuller'. In eight verses of four lines each, the author compares the cat's happy hunting with his own scholarly pursuits.

I and Pangur Ban my cat, Tis a like task we are at: Hunting mice is his delight, Hunting words I sit all night.

A medieval King of Wales, Hywel Dda (the Good) passed legislation making it illegal to kill or harm a cat.

Black cats are generally held to be unlucky in Western Europe (and as a result, this superstition can be found in the rest of the Western world), and to portend good luck in the United Kingdom. In the latter country, a black cat entering a house or ship is a good omen, and a sailor's wife should have a black cat for her husband's safety on the sea.Eyers, Jonathan (2011). Don't Shoot the Albatross!: Nautical Myths and Superstitions. A&C Black, London, UK. . Elsewhere, it is considered unlucky if a black cat crosses one's path; black cats have been associated with death and darkness. White cats, bearing the colour of ghosts, are conversely held to be unlucky in the United Kingdom, while tortoiseshell cats are lucky. It is common lore that cats have nine lives. It is a tribute to their perceived durability, their occasional apparent lack of instinct for self-preservation, and their seeming ability to survive falls that would be fatal to other animals.

Folklore in the Low Countries dating back to as early as 1607 tells that a cat will suffocate a newborn infant by putting its nose to the child's mouth, sucking the breath out of the infant.

In Medieval Ypres, cats were used in the winter months to control the vermin infesting the wool stored in the upper floors of the Cloth Hall. At the start of the spring warm-up, after the wool had been sold, the cats were thrown out of the belfry tower to the town square below, which supposedly symbolised "the killing of evil academics". In today's Kattenstoet ('Cat Parade'), this was commuted to the throwing of woollen cats from the top of out houses and also the people from the Middle Ages often used to suck on the wool as a sign of good luck.

Religious persecution and superstitions

Medieval Roman Catholic authors associated cats with the Devil, heretics, and witchcraft, while in many Catholic cities there were actual public ceremonies in which cats were tortured and killed.

One of the earlier written examples is Walter Map’s late-twelfth-century De nugis curialium. Map describes a gathering of heretics at which a large cat appears and is treated with ritual reverence. A similar motif occurs in Alain of Lille’s De fide catholica, where heretics are accused of kissing the rear end of a cat in which Lucifer appears to them. These accounts are polemical and cannot by themselves establish that such rituals actually occurred, but they demonstrate that the association of cats with heresy and the Devil was already present in medieval Catholic literature before it entered papal legislation.

In 1233, this motif appears in an official papal document. Pope Gregory IX issued Vox in Rama in connection with the persecution of an alleged Luciferian sect in Germany. The text survives in the papal registers and was edited by Carl Rodenberg in Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae (MGH, 1883, pp. 432–435). It is also catalogued in the APOSCRIPTA database of papal letters as no. 3644. In its description of the alleged ritual, Gregory reports the appearance of a large black cat as part of a demonic cult. Pope was not merely recording a curious story: the document calls upon ecclesiastical and secular authorities to take action against those accused of belonging to the sect.APOSCRIPTA / TELMA, Papal letter no. 3644Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae, vol. 1, 1883, pp. 432–435

Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus on 5 December 1484. Pope describes people in several German dioceses who have supposedly abandoned the Catholic faith, consort with demons, and use incantations, conjurations, and other “abominable superstitions” to harm people, livestock, crops, and other animals. The bull explicitly confirms the inquisitorial authority of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger and orders that those found guilty be corrected, imprisoned, punished, and fined, with the secular arm to be invoked when necessary.Pope Innocent VIII, Summis desiderantes affectibus, 5 December 1484

In his book Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat, historian Donald W. Engels convincingly argues that the Papal Church's struggle against alleged "Satanic" cults and heresy contributed to the persecution of cats, noting that a broad campaign of extermination took place during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Donald W. Engels, Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat