Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [49]
Bubastis, center of cat worship, became the capital of all Egypt, and in April and May some seven hundred thousand pilgrims gathered there for the yearly festival of Bastet. By most accounts it was the kind of party that in modern times would have ended with tear gas and fire hoses. The annual religious duty of the faithful around 950 B.C. was to spend the spring drinking heavily and making public love to one and all to set an example for the season’s crops. Those who were unable to make the pilgrimage heard the roistering boats go by on the Nile and began their own sacred duties in the streets of their home towns.
It all sounds a bit rowdy for a cat’s taste, and probably the objects of this devotion were glad to take up their customary positions under chairs while the party raged.
In 500 B.C., the Persian king Cambyses invaded Egypt and laid successful seige to the city of Pelusium, giving birth to a tale that turns up in various versions from various scholarly sources, each solemnly represented as historical fact. In one version, the
Persians threw live cats over the walls of the city, which blasphemy so panicked the Egyptian defenders that they ran distracted till the city fell. A second version says the Persians carried cats instead of shields, and naturally no Egyptian could touch them for fear of harming a cat and incurring the death penalty himself. Version three says simply that the Egyptians refused to engage in battle at all lest a cat in the city be accidentally hurt, and so surrendered without a blow exchanged. The fourth version says that Cambyses ordered his soldiers to search the area and collect all the cats, and men attacked the town driving a horde of cats before him, each soldier carrying a live cat, and the Egyptians surrendered to protect them.
Somehow the whole episode seems odd. Even in those far-off times cats had claws, and a natural aversion to being thrown over walls or snatched up and clutched as shields by strange soldiery. And as for rounding up hundreds of cats for this base purpose in an area where they were held sacred, how did the Persians manage that? Were they starving strays; were gods allowed to wander loose and starving? And even if they were, consider the problem of the average Persian foot soldier chasing a stray cat across fields and down alleys with which the cat was more familiar than the man. And what of the populace, the Egyptians outside the besieged city; what were they doing while an army chased their cats? Did the soldiers burst into their houses and kidnap their personal cats, when a cat is so small and easy to hide and an Egyptian would fight like a tiger to defend it? And how do you drive a horde of cats before you? Cats are not sheep. The vision of a Persian army organizing a mass of angry, terrified cats and moving them in a forward direction toward a designated goal is hard to entertain no matter how deep one’s respect for historians.
It all sounds a little like a contemporary joke, translated and solemnized in later centuries, as if one of our political cartoons were unearthed and reported as gospel: see, their president held hands with a bomb, or see, a donkey sat in their Senate. Maybe after the fall of Pelusium some local wag made it up to tease the defeated commander, or maybe he made it up himself as an excuse, and the versions developed by word of mouth for a while before anyone wrote them down. I for one don’t believe anything except that Pelusium fell to Cambyses, while the local cats went padding about their apolitical purposes underfoot.
Still, Egypt’s strong feelings