Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [46]
Alas for eurochauvinism, the evidence of origin seems weighted in favor of North Africa, though Darwin said Asia, and another source says libyca is as much Asian as African. And domestic cats were mentioned in Chinese and Sanskrit writings from several thousand years ago, though they may not be quite the same cats we’re talking about. There’s a modern domestic cat in India, small and spotted, that looks a lot like Felis ornata, a desert cat that still runs wild there and interbreeds with house cats.
Cats of one kind or another, large and small, are native to all continents except Australia and Antarctica; many of them, though visibly different, are cross-fertile. I don’t see why we need to narrow it down to a single, historically verified, proto-house cat, especially since no one seems able to. Many small cats can be tamed. No one knows why.
The business of tamability doesn’t much interest historians; no one wonders what it means, this inclination to our society, or why it should happen at all. It’s quite reasonable that so many wild creatures can’t be tamed even when caught young and gently treated; it seems vastly strange that some are naturally pleased to share their lives with us even under circumstances, as must have happened often, when their own world was just as comfortable as ours, or more so. Scholars who believe that humans have only to will a thing in order to accomplish it say we “tamed” cats because they caught rats and mice, but who among us has an owl or a blacksnake asleep on our couch? There must have been some give-and-take, a willingness on the cat’s part, or we would have had a prisoner instead of a friend. Northerners like Kipling make much of fire and warmth as a lure, but the first tame cats of record lived in mild and pleasant climates.
Cats are the only domestic animals that came to us from independent lives. All the rest of our retinue arrived with innate traditions of pack or flock or herd, of follow-the-leader, of submission to a superior or to the common law of the group. Only the cat had always made its own decisions. It decided in our favor, for reasons we will never know.
All we know for certain of the early days is that some millions of years ago cat-type animals appeared, and then some five or six thousand years ago the Egyptians were tripping over a cat in the kitchen, and calling it “mau.”
Why did they call it “mau"? You’ll never guess. Mau is also the Egyptian word for seeing or for light, and because of the reflecting layer of tapetum behind a cat’s eyes that makes them glow in the dark, and the way the pupils contract and expand, cats came to be associated with light, and more specifically with the changeable moon that hoards the sun’s light for us during the dark hours; hence “mau.”
This is an example of scientific reconstruction at its finest. Not for scientists the offhand supposition that they might have called it something before they decided its eyes were like the moon; not for them the humble domestic scenario:
“There’s something at the door that says ‘mau,’ and it wants to come in.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No, it’s quite small. Sometimes it makes a humming sound, then it rubs against my legs and says ‘mau.’ “ “Let it come in, then.”
“Come in, Mau.”
No cat ever came to the door and said “cat.” It’s a most unfeline syllable, and its origins are another flurry of confusion. It shows up in Latin and Greek around the first century A.D., although one source tells us Herodotus was using kattos four hundred years earlier, and said it was an Egyptian word. An ancient writer says the Latin catus is from cattare, which in turn is from captare oculis, “to catch by seeing.” In 1658 The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes said it came from the Latin cautus, meaning “cautious.” Untouched by Latin, the Zoroastrians