As I understand it, in Ancient Egypt the pet cat was less of a house pet and more of a respected member of the household, with full burial and funeral rights. With this in mind, do we know anything about what families would name their pet cats? Or were they given regular, run-of-the-mill person names?
"Hey, don't sit there, that's Mittens' seat. You can sit on the floor."
Actually, typically a cat in ancient Egypt was simply called cat. Cats as pets are recorded from the 12th Dynasty on, but they didn't usually receive personal names. (Fischer, More Ancient Egyptian Names of Dogs and Other Animals). Incidentally, the word for cat is 'mjw' in ancient Egyptian, pronounced rather adorably as 'mioo'!
There have been many examples of mummified cats, the most famous example being the stone sarcophagus of the cat of Prince Thutmose, son of Amenhotep III, brother to the future king Akhenaten. Its name is recorded as t3-mjwt, pronounced "ta mioot", meaning something like 'the she-cat'.
However, there is another example of a cat that has been named 'nDm' or 'nDmt', pronounced 'nedjem' or 'nedjemet' which means something like 'the sweet one' or 'sweetie' (Davies, The Tomb of Puyemre at Thebes). It certainly does have a Mittens or Fluffy vibe to it.
So in most cases, the cat was just called cat, but there are rare cases of pet-type names.
Hi there!
I'm not sure about the idea of cats receiving "full burial and funeral rights" -- it's not something I've heard of as a widespread thing. I'm interested to know where you heard of it!
I took a look in Jaromir Malek's The Cat in Ancient Egypt to answer this question, and here's what I found:
A great deal of our information about the role of cats in Egyptian domestic life comes from their appearance in tomb paintings, specifically the depiction of domestic scenes of family life. Family pets made appearances in these paintings, and while a family's dog tend to have names ("Ebony," "Black, "Big;" Malek notes a "poetically named" dog called "Hemuma," or "Steering-Oar of the Lion"), cats do not. Malek does mention an exception: a cat named "Nedjem," "Sweet" or "Pleasant," in an Eighteenth-Dynasty Tomb.
Specifically in reference to your mention of a burial and funerary rights, Malek also mentions the existence of a limestone sarcophagus for a cat, bearing the titles of Prince Thutmose. Here's a photo of it at the Wikimedia Commons. However, to my understanding, this extravagant treatment is the exception, not the rule, and cat mummies of the order found in large animal cemeteries are much, much more common. These cemeteries were generally attached to specific temples, and Malek states that the cats in them probably came from "catteries" attached to the temples, not family homes.
I hope this was at all helpful!
