Cat Mummies & Log Cabins

Ancient Egyptian culture had a thing for cats

(For all I know current Egyptian culture may have a thing for cats.)

British Museum collection of cat mummies.

They have a good collection and the best online photos .

Ancient Egyptians mummified their cats, particularly in the First Millennium BC

---not THAT ancient.

When I lived in Chicago I used to love to go to the Field Museum. As I recall they had Open Storage where you could pull out drawers and see the cat mummies.

Cat mummy/Field Museum

We're looking at the linen mummy wrappings here.

Linen-wrapped cat mummies were often placed inside sarcophagi.

New York Times

This all had something to do with religious worship of a cat god Bastet.

Of course I was immediately struck by the patterns in the mummy wrappings.

Perfect Sunshine & Shadow Log Cabin blocks

Courthouse Steps

And Housetops.

Now this is just a parallel design idea --- We can't conclude one affected the other.

Or is it?

But how could Egyptian cat mummy wrapping style from 1000 BC influence

patchwork quilt design in 1860s AD American and British quiltmaking?

Channeling Nefertiti

Options

1) Claiming an Egyptian past life.

(Can't buy it.)
2) Some kind of inherited ancient cultural memory ala 19th-c-African design influencing 1940s African-American quilts.
(Can't buy it.)

3) Spiritualists summoning Nefertiti and friends to 1860s seances.

(Can't buy it.)
4) 1860s women saw cat mummy wrapping designs.
(More likely than one would guess.)

Scudder's American Museum 1810-1841

Nineteenth-century entertainment venues included museums with a variety of exhibits. In New York there was Scudder's Museum where the exhibits included a stuffed bison, an 18-foot snake and a lamb with two-heads.

In Philadelphia the Peale's Museum showed family paintings, an Egyptian human mummy head as well as natural curiosities, the most famous being a skeleton of a mastodon.

Barnum's American Museum

P.T. Barnum bought Scudder's Museum in 1841 and added his own touch, including human exhibits like Tom Thumb, Cheng & Eng and several fraudulent assemblages purported to be previously unknown creatures.

The Feejee Mermaid was quite a draw, a public relations triumph.

Mummies fascinated the public too.

Egyptian culture and artifacts were fashionable once Napoleon's armies began plundering the area in 1799, instigating a trade in mummies, human and otherwise.

Dog mummy, Brooklyn Museum

Ibis bird mummy, Brooklyn Museum

A search for mummy in the holdings of large art, history or natural history museums will often bring up photos of mummified animals (cats and otherwise.) These may have been brought to Europe and America as curiosities, marketed to those with a scientific or personal interest in exotic places and natural history. Surely they were displayed in the mid-19th-century museums.

Fertilizer?

The other way an American or British quiltmaker may have encountered a cat mummy is indeed strange. Entrepreneurs pillaging Egypt saw in the massive quantities of animal mummies potential as agricultural fertilizer. They exported boatloads of mummies to farmers. Whether the mummies were pulverized to linen, bone and other animal matter before the freight arrived in England and America is not clear but posts from Liverpool's World Museum indicate that the artifacts arrived intact---at least in an 1890 delivery.

"On 10th February 1890 an estimated 180,000 mummified cats, weighing 19.5 tons, were sold at auction at the docks in Liverpool. Almost all were crushed and spread on fields like manure but a few were saved and remain in World Museum."