Free Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp Page A

stages of the sun’s perilous journey through the imagined realm of the night, painted in great detail in the tombs in the Valley of Kings at Thebes.

28.
    MAT
     
     
     
     
    Modern furniture—from chairs and tables to sinks with draining boards—tends to be high off the ground, so we rarely need to flex the lower body. We do not squat or sit flat on the floor a great deal, and often find the positions uncomfortable. For traditional societies like ancient Egypt, ground-based living was the norm. The Egyptians did make elegant wooden furniture: stools, seats, small tables, and beds. Many examples are known from excavations or from ancient tomb pictures. A few were made to fold up for easy transportation. The bed of Queen Hetep-heres—mother of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid (c. 2589-2566 BC)—is a marvel of ingenuity and craftsmanship in the metal cladding of its pivoting joints. For any given household, however, items of wooden furniture were probably few in number and marked the status of the owner. In pictures of banquets, for example, the host and his wife sit side by side on chairs, but the guests often squat on mats on the floor, even ladies clad in the fashionable costume of the times. The hieroglyph for mat depicts a complete and almost square mat woven from plant materials. Another version of a mat is contained in the hieroglyph for “offering place” (see no. 98).
    The association between status and being seated was not consistent. There was a tradition, much older than furniture, which linked being seated on a mat with the exercise of authority, and especially the giving of judgment. We read of “scribes of the mat” and even of a “council of the mat,” but most notably it is upon mats that many of the gods would be sitting when the dead reached the halls of judgment: “I am there with Osiris, and my mat is his mat among the Elders,” states Chapter 124 of the Book of the Dead.

29.
    CAT
     
     
     
     
    During the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BC) it was fashionable to include a picture of a cat in domestic scenes of husband and wife painted in tomb chapels. The cat is beneath the wife’s chair, although in one tomb (of the sculptor Ipuy at Deir el-Medina) the husband also has a kitten on his lap. The cats are well observed. They gnaw bones, devour fish, spit at a goose. One is tied by a ribbon to the chair leg, another wears a bead necklace and earrings. They accompany the family on hunting parties in the marshes as if they are full members of the family. They are clearly pets, but did the Egyptians give them names? The sources are silent, but this might just be because cats belonged mainly to women, and most of our sources were compiled by men. The men were happy to give names to their dogs, and many examples are known. King Wahankh Intef of the 11 th Dynasty even included named dogs on his tombstone.
    There is one telling exception. A small limestone sarcophagus was commissioned by a crown prince of the 18th Dynasty, Thutmose. It was intended to contain a mummified cat named Tamyt, which means simply “female cat.” The sarcophagus carries standard religious texts, and they treat Tamyt as if she had been fully human, becoming Osiris on her death and joining the imperishable stars of heaven. It is tempting to see this as an ultimate expression of pet love; yet the completeness of Tamyt’s transformation into a spiritual being might be a sign that she was actually a sacred animal.
    The wild hunting instinct in cats gave them a place in the Egyptian pantheon, and this was especially so in the New Kingdom and later. Male cats, sometimes armed with a knife, appear as demons in the Otherworld, helping to kill the serpent foe of the sun-god. More people worshipped a female cat, however, incorporating images connected with a fierce lioness-goddess, Sekhmet. The cult of a cat goddess was associated with the sun-god Ra, with childbearing and with protection. The cult developed especially strongly at the