Egyptians Shaved Their Eyebrows When the Cat Died 🐈 #shorts

When an ancient Egyptian's cat died, the whole family shaved off their eyebrows. At least, that's what the Greek traveller Herodotus wrote, around 450 BC. For a dog, they shaved their whole head and body.

Cats were family. The oldest cat name we know, Nedjem, means "sweet". A prince even gave his cat her own carved stone coffin. But centuries later, temples sold young cats as mummies by the hundreds of thousands, and in 1890 about 180,000 of them were shipped to Liverpool and sold as fertiliser.

Sources: Herodotus, Histories 2.66; the limestone sarcophagus of Prince Thutmose's cat (Egyptian Museum, Cairo); contemporary reports of the 1890 Liverpool cat-mummy cargo.

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