Egyptian cats doing unusual things

I came across one really interesting book in my mummy cat research.  I did not actually read the book, but it has pictures!  In the spirit of The Blue Lantern, I will look at some of them.  I should point out one difference between myself and The Blue Lantern, a truly fine art blog - she actually knows something about her subject.

Let's see, what's this?  "A cat and a mouse engaged in a boxing match supervised by an eagle."  From the 1st or 2nd century.  You can go see it in Copenhagen, if the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek happens to have it out on the day you visit.

Unfortunately the eagle umpire is missing its head.  I love that it's actually grasping the palm leaf with one of its claws.

Today's exercise has one point: mummified cats are the least of it!  How about another one.

On the left we see "A cat slaying the Anophis serpent in front of the ished-tree," on a Book of the Dead papyrus, circa 1280 BC.  This was actually a common subject.  I chose the goriest version available.  This one is owned by the British Museum.

One more, another surprisingly common theme.  This is "a cat herding a flock of geese and a fox looking after a herd of goats while playing the double oboe."  British Museum, again, circa 1150 BC. 

The double oboe is amazing.  The fox has one foreleg sort of hooked over part of it, I guess.  The herd of geese is also amazing.  As is every single thing in this crazy 3,000 year-old picture.

I'm omitting the rat being fanned by its cat servant, and the cat whipping a human while a rat looks on, and many other magnificent things, including plenty of mummifed cat containers, and an X-ray of an actual mummified cat.  If interested at all, be sure to acquire The Cat in Ancient Egypt by Jaromir Malek (1993, British Museum Press), the source of these images.*  Malek mentions the Liverpool auction using extremely careful and unobjectionable language.  I've read a different book by Malek, the Phaidon Press Egyptian Art, typically gorgeous.  But it is deficient in mummy cat.

*  In order, I borrowed images 100, 51, and 96. 

A mummified cat miscellany - featuring swedes, guano, and sensitive pre-Raphaelites

Frankly, when I started investigating the mummified cats, I was hoping to debunk it.  The story is usually told quite badly, with important details omitted or mangled, and exaggerated to the point of falsehood.  The most common exageration is to use the Liverpool cat auction as a stand-in for the other importations of mummified cats that must have occurred, even though no one wrote down a word about them.  I'm convinced that this was it.

Many, many thanks, by the way, to the indefatigable Obooki for the English newspaper articles supplied in comments here.  His work is a tribute to the historic Anglo-American Special Relationship. The articles answer more questions than they raise, which is progress.  For one thing, the seesawing tonnage of mummified cats is explained: there was one shipment (19 1/2 tons) and two auctions, half of the cats in the first, half in the second.  The same buyer "won," if that's the right word, both lots, paying 1.6 times more for the second lot - all of that newspaper publicity must have driven up the price.  That second auction sounds like a circus.  A circus whose only attraction is cat mummies.

Bones as Fertilizer:  19th century England had an active animal bone and bone ash import trade that dates from the late 18th century and continued well into the 20th century.  Bones were ground and directly applied to crops, or, as the chemical fertilizer industry developed, used to make superphosphate fertilizers.  Although "15 per cent were taken by bone-turners and other for non-agricultural purposes."*  I don't even want to know.  Bone ash china, ma femme suggests.  Good point.

The article that supplied that quote also has a handy table of fertilizer prices, 1840-1870, including nitrate of soda, Peruvian guano, and "half-inch bones."  If I am reading the table correctly, the supposed mummy cats were auctioned for a price per ton comparable to that of other bone imports, at least in the first lot.  But the bone price series is incomplete, so who knows if the cats were bought at a premium or a discount.

Did you know that almost all of the guano imported into England went onto turnip crops?  Turnips and "swedes"?  What the heck is a swede?  (It's a rutabaga).  All turned into animal feed.

My bone chemistry question: does the phosphate content of old bones change over time?  Would four thousand year old animal bones be as useful for fertilizer as new ones?  It's a mineral, so why not. 

Mummy Paint, Mummy Powder:  The thing that still puzzles me is that mummies were in fact imported to England for two high-end purposes.  They were ground up to powder for sale as a) medicine, and b) paint.  The scattered and poorly sourced references I've found to these trades refer to these as valuable items, priced per ounce, not per ton.  But I have no idea what amount of actual mummy went into paint and quack powder.  The medicinal mummy dust was notoriously faked.  And anyway, the key part of mummy powder was a mineral salt called natron, which is part of the rags, not of the bones.

I haven't been able to figure out which part or how much of the mummy went into "Mummy Brown" or "Egyptian Brown" paint, either.  I read a crazy story about the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema coming upon his assistants grinding up a mummy for paint.  Alma-Tadema, horrified to learn that there was human material in his paint, rushed off to tell Edward Burne-Jones, who also didn't know that "Mummy Brown" contained actual mummy.  They then - well, let's turn to Rudyard Kipling's memoir.  Burne-Jones was Kipling's uncle:

And once he descended in broad daylight with a tube of 'Mummy Brown' in his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharoahs and we must bury it accordingly.  So we all went out and helped - according to the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope - and - to this day I could drive a spade within a foot of where that tube lives. (Something of Myself, Chapter 1, p. 10 of the 1990 Cambridge University Press edition).

Note that Alma-Tadema has vanished from Kipling's version, which was written fifty years after the fact.  Is any of this true?  I thought art historians had gotten interested in materials and prices and that sort of thing, but I can't find any real information about "Mummy Brown."

Is this all the result of a large mummy trade?  Or the product of a small number of mummies smuggled out of Egypt (I've seen sources that imply this)?  Or is the amount of actual mummy rather more homeopathic?  And why couldn't the cats be used for this more valuable purpose?  You can order your own supply of mummy-free Mummy Brown right here.

How to read late 19th century newspapers:  One thing I've learned here is that I don't really know how to use these sources.  To what degree should I trust what I find in a late 19th century newspaper?  Of all the newspaper articles I or Obooki found, only one (The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, Feb 11, 1890) reads like an eyewitness account.  Newspapers today have been known to print lightly edited press releases.  They're a source; sources have problems; be careful out there.
Perhaps it's better that the mummified cat story is true. It's so ridiculous.  So unrealistic.  So much fun.


*  All guano and bone-related information from Mathews, W. M. "Peru and the British Guano Market, 1840-1870." The Economic History Review, 23:1 (April 1970), pp. 112-28.  That bone-turner business is from footnote 6, p. 121.  The table with the price series for various types of fertilizer is on p. 120.  Note that the period covered here ends before the legendary mummy cat auction.

Horrible Result of Using the "Egyptian Fur-tiliser" - or Punch as proof

So last March we were genially discussing a misapplied Mark Twain quotation when the Curse of the Mummy Cats was somehow triggered and I got sucked into their dusty world, which smells vaguely of fish.  Nile perch, I think.

Mark Twain had put me in a skeptical mood, so I decided to look around.   My first attempt to debunk investigate the story that cats were imported into England for fertilizer led me right to:

Wake, Jehanne. Kleinwort, Benson: the History of Two Families in Banking. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Specifically page 118, visible at Google Books right here:

Kleinworts also financed the import of cotton from Egypt for Stucken and Co. of Liverpool. And in February 1890 gained notoriety over another of their Egyptian imports. When their client refused to accept a shipment of fertilizer, Kleinworts were left with the cargo. This consisted not of fertilizer but the raw material for it, namely 180,000 mummified cats excavated from their ancient burial ground in Egypt. Kleinworts consigned the 19 ½ tons of embalmed cats to auction where they fetched £3 13s. 9d. per ton; the auctioneer knocked the lots down using one of the cats’ heads as a hammer.¹⁸

So it seems that I had already found the cats.  I just needed to inspect footnote 18, which would tell me how we knew all of this.  The footnotes were not available through Google Books, so I needed the actual book.  Here's what I found (note that KBA means "Kleinwort Benson Archives, Fenchurch Street") on p. 453, footnote 18 in its entirety:

Punch and Daily Graphic, 15 Feb 1890, Press Clippings file, KBA.

Punch?  Punch???  That's a comedy magazine!  I don't have access to the Daily Graphic, but Punch is easy to find.  Let's see, 15 Feb, 1890.  Here it is, p. 81:

Horrible Result of Using the "Egyptian Fur-tiliser."  Click to enlarge, so you can really appreciate the foreshortening of the hind leg of the fleeing farmer, and the ghostly mummy cat eyebeams.  Now, once I saw this magnificent creation, I knew I had to write about mummified cats, sometime, somehow. 

But please note what's going on here.  A historian supports a complicated and unlikely story about the importation of mummified cats for use as fertilizer not with a newspaper account, or an internal memo, or a letter, but with a file folder that contains the above Punch cartoon and, if I understand what the London Daily Graphic is, yet another illustration.  Isn't the footnote supposed to tell me where to find the information being footnoted?  Oxford University Press!  And then there's this Routledge book I found - no, that's enough whining about footnoting.

Perhaps if I can see the Daily Graphic article, or the Daily Paper article mentioned in the caption of the Punch cartoon, or the London Times articles I mentioned yesterday, this will all be straightened out, although I doubt it.  It's just that, see, if a historian writes a book about the history of a Liverpool merchant firm and all he can find in their own archives about one of the oddest events in their history is a pair of clipped cartoons, maybe something else is going on.

Tomorrow:  Peruvian bat guano, mummies as medicine, mummies as paint, and guest appearances by Rudyard Kipling and Edward Burne-Jones.

A Wuthering Expectations Investigative Report - Were mummified cats actually shipped to England for use as fertilizer? Yes, probably. I didn't say it was a good investigation.

I've been wasting my time researching the importation of mummified cats to Europe and elsewhere.  For what purpose?  Let's not get into that.  Neil, of the magnificent Adventures in the Print Trade, inspired me way back here.  If I'm lucky, this will be the stupidest thing I ever do here - the very first Wuthering Expectations Special Investigative Report.

Were mummified cats shipped to England to be used for fertilizer?  After months of investigation, the shocking answer is: probably, although I have my doubts, but no more than once.  I thought I might get a week out of this.  Now it's going to be a couple of days, because the conclusion is lame.  I could spend a lot of time whining about the low quality of sourcing in books from respected academic publishers, but I'll keep that to myself.

The problem is that National Geographic forced my hand this month with a typically excellent cover story on the subject.  The article is about how Egyptologists are squeezing all sorts of new information out of mummified animals. 

The article begins with a description of the 1888 discovery of the enormous cat cemetery near Beni Hasan.  Their source is the Liverpool Egyptologist William Martin Conway, writing for the English Illustrated Magazine.  That article can be found on Google Books in Conway's The Dawn of Art in the Ancient World (1891), with pp. 181-3 of special relevance.  The best specimens - intact, even gilded - are valued for the souvenir trade.  The mass, though, "a layer of them, a stratum thicker than most coal seams, ten to twenty cats deep" (Conway, 181) suffer a different fate:

Some contractor came along and offered so much a pound for their bones to make into something - soap, or tooth-powder, I dare say, or even paint. So men went systematically to work, peeled cat after cat of its wrappings, stripped off the brittle fur, and piled the bones in black heaps, a yard or more high, looking from the distance like a kind of rotting haycocks scattered on the sandy plain.  The rags and other refuse, it appears, make excellent manure, and donkey loads of them were carried off to the fields to serve that useful, if unromantic, purpose. (Conway, 182-3)

Conway appears to be an eyewitness.  Here is where we must get the cats for the next step in the journey.  Now I'm quoting the National Geographic article: "One ship hauled about 180,000, weighing some 38,000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England."  The consignment of this shipment was announced in the February 4, 1890 London Times, and its auction in the February 11 paper.*  The first article title mentions 19 tons of embalmed cats, the second 9 tons of mummy cats, which turns out to cause great confusion in later references.  The number of cats, 180,000, seems to be the result of assuming that each cat weighted 1/10 of a pound (9 tons times 10 cats per pound). 

See also this March 2, 1890 New York Times paragraph describing the auction.  You might see what caught my attention.  Weird piece, written at third hand.  Note the appearance of "two gentlemen described as 'evidently scientists'".  A critical reader of historical evidence may begin to wonder what's going on here.

I still wonder.  Two years after the discovery of the cat cemetery in Egypt, described in a well-known article by a Liverpool professor, a shipment of an "undistinguishable mass of fragments", along with some intact mummified cats, arrives in Liverpool and is auctioned off.  Some sort of link between Conway's piles of bones and this shipment would be nice.  An actual eyewitness account of the auction would be nice.

Note, please, that I have not come across a single reference, reliable or otherwise, to any other shipment of mummified animals to England, or anywhere.  This one is apparently it.  More on this one tomorrow, including a cartoon.

*  Source: Palmer’s Index to the Times, January 1st to March 31st 1890.  I haven't seen the articles.  Anyone who wants to pursue this will need better access to old English newspapers than I have.