Herding Cats through the Millennia

The history of our relationship with felines did not begin with mutual endearments, but rather with a stroke of cold calculation during the Neolithic era. Within the settlements of the Fertile Crescent, humanity began to stockpile grain, which inevitably attracted rodents. And in the wake of the mice came their wild hunters.

A Journey Spanning Millennia

Cats proved to be the ideal companions for an expanding civilisation, following agriculturalists as they colonised new territories. In Ancient Egypt, an important genetic upgrade occurred: Near Eastern cats interbred with local wild specimens, fusing African and Asian genes. Phoenician merchants transformed them into ‘sea dogs’ of a feline variety, dispersing them across the entire Mediterranean. By the 5th century AD, as the Western Roman Empire drifted toward its twilight, feline paws had trodden upon the shores of the Baltic.

An Etymologically Dark Chamber

The origin of the very word cat is a veritable puzzle for linguists. Most concur that it is a Wanderwort—a nomadic word that drifted from people to people alongside commodities.

Yet whence did it originally spring? The theories are legion, each more colourful than the last:

• The Roman Trail: The Latin catta makes its first appearance in Martial around 75 AD.
• The Nubian Hypothesis: The Swiss scholar Adolphe Pictet maintained that the root originated in Africa. Among the Barabra people along the Egyptian-Sudanese border, the cat is called kaddiska, whilst in the Nobiin language, it is kadis.
• The Arabic Dispute: The American linguist Lionel Bender objected that the Nubians might simply have borrowed the word from the Arabs. However, the Arab etymologist Ibn Duraid, as early as the turn of the 10th century, rejected any link between kitt(a) and Arabic roots, pointing instead to the genuinely Arabic sinnawr, derived from the Akkadian šurānuum.
• The Egyptian Version: The French classical scholar Jean-Paul Savignac suggested, relying on the presence of the word šau in Coptic, that it once existed in Egyptian, with a feminine -t suffix appended. However, the semitist John Huehnergard dismantled this theory by noting that Egyptian simply possesses no such word-formation model.
• The Uralic Trace: The Indo-Europeanist Guus Kroonen links the word entirely to the Proto-Uralic *käďwä, which denoted the female of a small fur-bearing creature—perhaps an ermine—and which survives today in the languages of the Hungarians, Khanty, Mansi, and Sámi.

What Were They Called Before?

Before the universal term for ‘cat’ conquered the globe, various peoples employed their own vivid metaphors:

• Ancient Greeks called the cat ailouros. When one dissects the word into its components (aiolos, meaning agile or shifting, and oura, tail), one arrives at the charming appellation of ‘twirl-tail’.
• Romans were considerably more pragmatic. Alongside the classical feles—which, together with catus, gave us the binomial nomenclature for the domestic cat, Felis catus—they utilised functional names: muriceps or musio, meaning ‘mouser’, and even pilax (from the Greek phylax), meaning ‘protector’. Meanwhile, folk etymology even linked their name feles with felix—‘happiness’.

It is rather wondrous that, across millennia, the essence of our relationship has remained unaltered. Regardless of what we choose to call them—be they ‘twirl-tails’ or ‘happiness’—they continue to arrive at our thresholds, bringing with them a touch of comfort and a soupçon of Neolithic wildness.