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Bastets & Sekhmets
A collection of Egyptian Bastet and Sekhmet figurines illustrating the importance of cat iconography in Egyptian culture.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Questions & Answers
When and where were cats first domesticated?
- It is unknown where cats were first domesticated, but it has been established they were so by c. 12,000 BCE in Mesopotamia.
Where did domesticated house cats come from?
- Domesticated house cats came from wild cats and it has been established that wild cats lived among humans 100,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. These wild cats eventually befriended humans and were domesticated by them.
Were dogs or cats domesticated first?
- Dogs were domesticated before cats. According to some cat owners, cats have never actually been domesticated.
Which ancient civilization is most closely associated with cats?
- Ancient Egypt is the civilization most closely associated with cats as one of their most popular goddesses, Bastet, was envisioned as a cat or a woman with a cat's head.
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License & Copyright
This image was first published on Flickr.
Original image by Kotomi Yamamura. Uploaded by Mark Cartwright, published on 17 November 2012. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms.
