Though ancient Egyptians didn’t literally worship house cats, they revered them. Keeping a cat in one’s home was considered a way of both attracting good fortune and warding off evil spirits. A cat’s passing was considered a significant loss. Owners would shave their eyebrows when their cats died, the beginning of a mourning period that didn’t end until their eyebrows grew back. Ancient Egyptians also saw cats as symbols of the gods’ divine qualities and had two gods that were in feline form – the most important being Bastet, a goddess of the home, fertility, and childbirth. Dogs were also kept as family pets but were distinctly inferior to cats. There was no ‘dog god’ (the closest had the head of a Jackal), and killing a dog was not a crime – but killing a cat, even by accident, was punishable by death.
