Archaeologists have discovered a pet cemetery in Egypt that dates back over 2,000 years. Ancient Egyptians revered and loved their pets, including cats, dogs and monkeys.
It makes you wonder how societies got away from that and began stupidly treating dogs and cats as "things" instead of living, breathing, thinking creatures of love. It took societies around the world almost 2,000 more years to re-learn pets need to be loved and cared for like family. Here's the story of the finding from Science:
The cats and dogs lie as if asleep, in individual graves. Many wore collars or other adornments, and they had been cared for through injury and old age, like today’s pets. But the last person to bury a beloved animal companion in this arid Egyptian land on the coast of the Red Sea did so nearly 2000 years ago.
The site, located in the early Roman port of Berenice, was found 10 years ago, but its purpose was mysterious. Now, a detailed excavation has unearthed the burials of nearly 600 cats and dogs, along with the strongest evidence yet that these animals were treasured pets. That would make the site the oldest known pet cemetery, the authors argue, suggesting the modern concept of pets wasn’t alien to the ancient world.
“I’ve never encountered a cemetery like this,” says Michael MacKinnon, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Winnipeg who has studied the role of animals across the bygone Mediterranean but was not involved with the new work. “The idea of pets as part of the family is hard to get at in antiquity, but I think they were [family] here.”
Archaeozoologist Marta Osypinska and her colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered the graveyard just outside the city walls, beneath a Roman trash dump, in 2011. The cemetery appears to have been used between the first and second centuries C.E., when Berenice was a bustling Roman port that traded ivory, fabrics, and other luxury goods from India, Arabia, and Europe.
NOTE: Common Era is one of the year notations used for the Gregorian calendar, the world's most widely used calendar era. Before the Common Era is the era before CE. BCE and CE are alternatives to the Dionysian BC and AD notations, respectively.
In 2017, Osypinska’s team reported unearthing the remains of about 100 animals—mostly cats—which appear to have been cared for like pets. But the exact nature of the site wasn’t clear. Salima Ikram, an expert on ancient Egyptian animals at the American University in Cairo, said at the time that the bones might have been discarded rubbish.Osypinska and her colleagues have now excavated the remains of 585 animals from the site and analyzed the bones in detail. A veterinarian helped the team determine health, diet, and cause of death.
The animals appear to have been laid gently in well-prepared pits. Many were covered with textiles or pieces of pottery, “which formed a kind of sarcophagus,” Osypinska says. More than 90% were cats, many wearing iron collars or necklaces threaded with glass and shells. One feline was placed on the wing of a large bird.
The dogs, which make up only about 5% of the burials (the rest are monkeys), tended to be older when they died. Many had lost most of their teeth or suffered periodontal disease and joint degeneration.Osypinska hopes the new work will convince other archaeologists that companion animals are worth study. “At first, some very experienced archaeologists discouraged me from this research,” arguing the pets were irrelevant for understanding the lives of ancient peoples, she says. “I hope the results of our studies prove that it’s worth it.”
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