dshaw 6).
             Around 1000 BC, pharaohs of Libyan descent, who worshipped cat gods such as Bastet, ascended the throne. Bastet was a god with the head of a domestic cat who represented all the good aspects of the sun, and came to represent fertility both in the fields and in women. These pharaohs built the city of Bubastis, a center for Bastet's cult. Domestic cats were sacred and memorialized. Museums in the present day are filled with 3000-year-old paintings, engravings, sculptures, and amulets. They were so highly revered that to kill a cat often held the penalty of death (Beadle 67-68).
             As cats were held as holy, in death they were embalmed and mummified, being buried alongside humans, with the same kind of elaborate ceremony for the death of a human being followed. The owner's wealth determined the type of linen they were wrapped in and how elaborate the mummy case (Beadle 68). In 1888, a farmer accidentally uncovered a large cat cemetery with the bodies of over 80,000 mummified cats. A businessman decided to send them to England to convert to fertilizer, but English farmers didn't take to the new fertilizer and the venture ended in failure. (Bateson 185)
             Cats were associated with the heavenly bodies at this time. This belief originated from the belief that a cat's eye changes in shape and luminescence according to both the position of the sun and the phases of the moon. The Egyptians, Romans, Chinese, and later, even the English came to believe this. "Chinese...actually used cats' eyes as a means of telling the time of day" (Bateson 183).
             As cats reached a religious status, Egyptians considered their export to other countries as considered illegal and was therefore slow. "They even sent special agents out to neighboring parts of the Mediterranean to buy and repatriate cats that had been illicitly smuggled abroad" (Bateson 186). The domestic cat eventually reached Ind...