3 ms·
Egyptian art had very different conventions and esthetics. But also the cats themselves seem to be different (larger, IIRC, and different colored than the Europ
by gwern 8y ago
Egyptian art had very different conventions and esthetics. But also the cats themselves seem to be different (larger, IIRC, and different colored than the European cats you're probably more familiar with). If you want to take a look at all the kinds of cat-related artwork (including cartoons which I can only call cat memes, like artwork of rats laying siege to a cat fortress or cats whipping a human for unknown offenses), take a look at all the illustrations in Malek's _The Cat in Ancient Egypt_. You can get a high-quality scan from, ahem, the usual place.
One interesting thing about the cat mummies here is that they'll provide additional datapoints on how well fed temple-sacrificial cats were and how they were killed. And perhaps at some point some ancient DNA can be sequenced? Which will give interesting data about how domesticated they were. Bradshaw in _Cat Sense_ argues that the core work of domesticating cats was accomplished by the Ancient Egyptians as a byproduct of their large-scale breeding, necessary for the raising the vast volumes of cats to be sacrificed as offerings.
- dmix 8y agoIs putting underscores around titles a convention for some format? I see it around once in a while.
- scrollaway 8y agoProbably trying to make it italic, which is indeed a convention. Asterisks will work better on hn.
- gwern 8y agoI'm too lazy to remember how HN's pseudo-Markdown does (not) work.
- kylek 8y agoUnderscores usually means underline the words they're around. I believe underlining book titles is a MLA format thing (brb highschool english class flashbacks).