Did the Egyptians keep cats as pet like we do today? I know that people believed that cats were the pet of witches or a sign of bad luck (if black) in the Middle Ages. I know that the Plague was said to spread faster because people had killed many cats. When did this attitude begin to end?
Domestication started ~12,000 years ago as the first agrarian societies started to flourish. It's been suggested that cats "domesticated themselves", in that rather than purposefully trying to domesticate them, we kind of just fell into a relationship: agrarian societies store crops, crops are vulnerable to rats, but cats eat rats. People would then feed the cats so they would stick around and keep doing this.
Yep, most Ancient Egyptian households had a cat (often more than one).
We don't really know why cats became so maligned in the Middle Ages, but it wasn't necessarily a universal idea, as some people (even nuns!) kept cats as pets. Metzler theorized that it was because people were uncomfortable with their independent nature, defying the idea that animals were created by god to serve humans:
"Medieval people may have wanted to restrict cats to the function of animated mousetraps, for the very reason that the cat “stands at the threshold between the familiar and the wild.” “Cats were intruders into human society. They could not be owned. They entered the house by stealth, like mice, and were suffered because they kept the insufferable mice in check.” This causes a kind of conceptual tension. While the cat possesses the characteristics of a good hunter it is useful, “but as long as it does it remains incompletely domesticated.” Heretics, too, in a transferred sense, are not completely domesticated, since by challenging orthodox thought and roaming freely hither and thither in their interpretation of religious beliefs they resemble the bestiary definition of wildness."
Metzler also notes that cats were associated more with heretics and the devil than witches (we only started pairing cats and witches together relatively recently; it was more often thought that witches would transform into wolves or horses). It's possible there may be a biblical reason, as Kramer says that dogs are the sign of preachers and that dogs chase cats because cats are symbolic of the faithless.
The attitude started to wane in the 1600s.