The Egyptian Mau is one of the very oldest domesticated cat breeds in the world — possibly the oldest. The word mau in Ancient Egyptian simply meant 'cat', and tomb paintings from at least 1500 BCE show the very same spotted, almond-eyed, green-gazed creature still alive in pedigree catteries today. It is a living fossil of a breed.
But for the Egyptians it was far more than a pet. The Mau was sacred to Bastet, the cat-headed goddess of home, fertility and protection, and to her fierce lioness aspect Sekhmet. Killing a cat — even by accident — was punishable by death under Egyptian law. When a household cat died, the family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. When the cat goddess Bastet's city of Bubastis held its yearly festival, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims came down the Nile to honour her, and her temple kept thousands of sacred Maus cared for by full-time priests.
The mythology went deeper still. The great solar cat Mau was said to live in the Persea tree at Heliopolis, where each night it killed Apophis, the serpent of chaos that tried to swallow the sun before dawn. Every sunrise was a victory the cat had won in the dark. Egyptian art shows it again and again — the spotted cat with a knife, slicing the great snake in half beneath the holy tree.
Archaeologists have found cat cemeteries containing tens of thousands of mummified Maus, wrapped with the same care as human dead, complete with painted faces and tiny offerings. No other animal in the ancient world received that kind of sustained love.
Wear the Mau and you wear the oldest cat in the world — the one that killed the serpent of chaos every night so the sun could rise.