Ta-miu

Ta-miu is the earliest named pet cat whose burial we can still see. Her name is usually translated simply as "she-cat" — the Egyptian word for cat, given a feminine ending — and she belonged to Crown Prince Thutmose, eldest son of the pharaoh Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye, in Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty. Thutmose held the offices of High Priest of Ptah at Memphis and sem-priest, roles bound up with funerary ritual, which may go some way to explaining the extraordinary send-off he arranged for his cat.

When Ta-miu died, she was mummified and placed in a carved limestone sarcophagus of the kind made for people. Its sides are covered with funerary scenes: the cat sits upright before an offering table piled with food and flowers for the afterlife, attended by protective deities, while hieroglyphic inscriptions run across the lid. The imagery is not a novelty item or a joke — it borrows the standard grammar of an Egyptian elite burial and applies it, without apparent irony, to a household pet.

The object is also a small but genuinely useful piece of historical evidence. Thutmose is a shadowy figure who died before his father and vanished from the record, leaving his younger brother — the future Akhenaten — as heir, and so setting up one of the strangest episodes in Egyptian history. The inscriptions on Ta-miu's sarcophagus are among the sources that confirm Thutmose's titles and his standing as crown prince. A cat's coffin, in other words, helps pin down the succession of a dynasty.

Very little else is known. There is no record of how Ta-miu died, how long she lived, or what she looked like beyond the stylised profile carved into the stone; the sarcophagus is the whole of the evidence. What survives is the gesture rather than the biography — a prince of the richest kingdom on earth commissioning, for an animal, the same careful provision for eternity he would have wanted for himself.

The sarcophagus was found at Memphis and is now held by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is frequently reproduced as an illustration of the status cats enjoyed in ancient Egypt, where the goddess Bastet was depicted in feline form and cats were mummified in enormous numbers as votive offerings. Ta-miu stands slightly apart from all that: not a temple offering, but somebody's cat.