Cats at the Hebrew University

Another cat (not mine)

Trousers the cat
Via: https://www.reddit.com/r/catbellies/comments/8kh54j/trousers_the_cat/

Jerusalem Street Kitten

I spent this afternoon taking a walk around the neighborhood of Katamon, which is where I'm currently living in Jerusalem, and first I came upon one of the many street cats of Jerusalem. Jerusalem street kitten

From Katamon June 24, 2014

More on Semitic cats

I should be heading off to the library to work on my chapter on Testament of Job, Joseph and Aseneth, and Philo, instead of writing blog posts, but when it comes to cats, it's hard to resist.

My cat Zachary, a North American cat

One of the commenters on my earlier blogpost about cat names pointed me to an interesting article by John Huehnergard on Semitic (in particular, Arabic) names for cats. The article is entitled "Qitta: Arabic Cats," in a Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs, Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 407-418.

On page 407, he says that "while a common word for 'dog' appears in nearly all of the Semitic languages, allowing us to reconstruct a Proto-Semitic word *kalb-, there is no pan-Semitic word for 'cat'; instead, a variety of terms is attested." The situation is similar in Indo-European. He posits that this is because the cat was domesticated so much more recently than that the dog, and says that "It is generally agreed that the cat was first domesticated in Egypt, some four thousand years ago." Recent genetic studies, however, have shown that cats were domesticated about 10,000 years ago, at about the dawn of agriculture (as I have posted earlier in this blog).

On page 408, he uses a delightful story to illustrate the wide variety of terms for cats in Arabic: sinnawr, hirr, qitt, daywan, hayda, haytal, dam. The article then goes on to discuss these and several more.

One name for cats in Arabic is bass or biss - meaning "cat" and "sound made to a cat." As he comments, "They are similar, of course, to English puss (also in other Germanic languages) and to Berber muss (found also in Moroccan Arabic), all of which are probably onomatopoetic imitations of feline hissing."

On page 408, he writes about the word haytal, and he speculates that the word might be connected to Mishnaic and later Hebrew hatul (חתול) and Jewish Aramaic htula (חתולא). "All of these may
have been influenced by medieval Latin cat(t)ulus 'kitten,' i.e., small cat(t)us."

Another name is sinnawr. As he writes (p. 411), "Several eastern Aramaic dialects, namely, Syriac, Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, and Mandaic, have a form sun(n)ara 'cat'. This form is a metathetic variant of surana, which is also attested in Babylonian Aramaic. The latter first appears in the consonantal writing srn in the eighth century BCE Aramaic inscription from Sefire, where it probably denoted a local wildcat; it occurs in a curse formula alongside other animals that frequented abandoned sites:

May Arpad become a tell for [the inhabitants of the si,] the gazelle, the fox, the hare, the wildcat (srn), the owl, [...] and the magpie.

On page 412 he writes that the earliest attested Semitic word for "(wild)cat," Akkadian suranum, appears in an Old Babylonian text from the time of Hammurapi (early 18th century BCE). In Old Akkadian texts from the third millennium BCE, suranum is a personal name.

On page 413 he writes about qitt(a), dialectically qatt and qutt. This name is connected with Syriac qatta/qattu and "unavoidably, it seems, with Greek kattos, katta, and Latin cat(t)us, catta from the early centuries C.E. (the latter replacing feles when the domestic cat was introduced into Rome) and the wide array of similar forms in European languages." Some of the Arabic lexicographers considered the word qitt already to be a borrowed word. This word was not borrowed from Egyptian, where the word was miw, with Coptic emou - as he says, miw is imitative, and seems to me to be like our English word miaow, for the sound a cat makes. On page 414 he comments that one of the Arabic terms for cat is al-ma'i'a or al-ma'iyya - "the form of a participle of the onomatopoetic verb ma'a, 'to mew.'" It might also reflect the ancient Egyptian miw.

Sand cats come back to Israel

A rather sweeter piece of news: In Israeli zoo, newborn kittens bring sand cats back from extinction.

Mazal tov! A breed of cat that was extinct in Israel has found new life at Ramat Gan Safari Park. Rotem, a sand cat from Germany, and Sela, from Poland, are the proud purring parents of four little kittens – two boys and two girls – who were born in Israel earlier this month. 

According to Keren Or, Zoological Information Coordinator at the Ramat Gan Safari Park, the "sand cat is an extinct species in Israel, although in the world it's not extinct, it's nearly threatened." In an interview with Reuters, Or added that "here in Israel, it has been extinct because it was pushed away from the sand by other mammals." 

Sand cats are true desert cats that have a high mortality rate among newborns in captivity, according to Reuters. But these kittens are doing fine so far.

Their ears are so big! In comparison, a photo of my cat Zachary.

Jerusalem street cats

Two Jerusalem cats at 12 Elazar ha-Modai St.

 Because so many people make their way to this blog when they are searching for cats online, I decided to put "Jerusalem street cats" into Google, and discovered that this blog in fact is the first hit. There were some other interesting sites after it - one a Facebook page whose goal is protect the neglected street cats of Jerusalem. Another was an article on the cats of Jerusalem by Basem Raad in the Jerusalem Quarterly, published by the Institute of Jerusalem Studies. While the article makes a number of questionable assertions, it is also an affecting, humane meditation on the street cats and how they are mistreated by people. He writes:

Something similar happens with cats and people in the old streets of Jerusalem. Jerusalem cats stand apart; they are and are not like other cats. What is striking is the absolute non-pet nature of their existence and the feline grace some of them can exhibit, even under conditions of hardship. I am speaking of the many street cats, not the ones owned by west Jerusalem Israelis who have come from the West and imported that pet culture (and sometimes the pets themselves) with them, or the few cats kept by “aristocratic” Palestinian families in east Jerusalem who generally keep their pets locked up inside. That kind of culture comes with luxury. The “non-pets” are the many feral cats on the streets, mostly on the east side of the city or within the confines of the Old City walls.

It is actually not true that feral cats are mostly on the eastern side of the city - there are many street cats in West Jerusalem as well, and they are generally subjected to the same sad fate as the east Jerusalem and Old City street cats that he writes about.

The author argues also that the English name "cat" probably comes from North African and Asiatic roots, which I suppose is possible, but the Oxford English Dictionary's entry on the etymology of the word does not mention such an origin.

Etymology:  The Middle English and modern cat corresponds at once to Old English cat and Old Northern French cat. The name is common European of unknown origin: found in Latin and Greek in 1–4th cent., and in the modern languages generally, as far back as their records go. Byzantine Greek had κάττα (in Cæsarius c350) and later κάττος, as familiar terms = αἴλουρος; modern Greek has γάτα from Italian. Latin had catta in Martial a100, and in the Old Latin Bible version (‘Itala’), where it renders αἴλουρος. Palladius, ? c350, has catus, elsewhere scanned cātus (Lewis and Short), and probably in both cases properly cattus. From cattus, catta, came all the Romanic forms, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, Portuguese gato, Catalan gat, Provencal cat, Old Northern French cat, French chat, with corresponding feminines gatta, gata, cata, cate, chate, chatte. The Germanic forms recorded are Old English cat, catt, Old Norse kött-r ( < kattuz) masculine, genitive kattar (Swedish katt, Danish kat); also Old English catte ? feminine, West Germanic *katta (Middle Low German katte, Middle Dutch katte, kat, Dutch kat, also Swedish katta), Old High German chazzâ (Middle High German, modern German katze) feminine; Old High German had also chataro, Middle High German katero, kater, modern German and Dutch kater, he-cat. The Germanic types of these would be *kattuz (masculine), *kattôn- (feminine), *kat(a)zon- masculine; but as no form of the word is preserved in Gothic, it is not certain that it goes back to the Germanic period. It was at least West Germanic c400–450. It is also in Celtic: Old Irish cat (masculine), Gaelic cat com., Welsh and Cornish cath (feminine), Breton kaz, Vannes kac'h m. Also in Slavonic, with type kot-: Old Slavonic kot'ka (feminine), Bulgarian kotka, Slovene kot (masculine), Russian kot (masculine), kotchka, koshka (feminine), Polish kot (koczur m.), Bohemian kot (masculine), kotka (feminine), Sorbian kotka; also Lithuanian kate; Finnish katti.

On the other hand, the Arabic word for "cat" does seem very similar to the Indo-European. From Wiki Answers:

A male cat = qitt قطّ
A female cat = qitta قطّة
Cats = qitat قطط

The Hebrew word for "cat" is unrelated - it is חתול or חתולה - hatul (masc.) or hatulah (fem.).

Cats!

I'm tired of politics, it's time for some cat pictures. The orange cat is Zachary, and the grey, black, and white one is Winkle.

Zachary

 

 

Winkle

Small plane flying above

5 Nisan - five days since the new moon.

A jet rushing to the east.

Winkle peering between the fence boards.

Happy eighth day of Hanukkah! חג אורים שמח!

Enough with the serious business - here are some photos of my Hanukkah candles tonight (first two photos). The third is a close-up photo of one of the rooms on a shelf I created with my childhood dollhouse furniture - the cat crouched to strike is a new acquisition. And the fourth is my very own cat, Zachary, looking up at me as I sit in front of the computer.

Sacred cats in Copenhagen

I just spent the day visiting museums in Copenhagen, including the ruins underneath the Christansborg castle, the Jewish museum, and the National Museum. At the last museum, I headed up to the third floor to see the Egyptian and classical galleries, and found some attractive displays. There were some charming little cat statues in one of the Egyptian galleries, dedicated to the goddess Bastet.

Sekhmet, sun and war goddess, from ca. 1403-1365, Luxor, Egypt

These two images are the enormous head and foot of a lion found at Hama, Syria - they guarded the royal citadel (ca. 900-720 BCE).

Street cats in Jerusalem

When I first got here in June I arrived just in time for Hebrew Book Week (שבוע הספר). I went off with a friend to the book fair at Gan ha-Pa'amon and bought a few books, including on on the development of the Old City of Jerusalem during the 19th century (Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City, published by Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute in 1984). Another one is called חתולי הרחוב שלי ("My Street Cats") by Raphaella Bilski (published by Carmel, 2007). It's about her adventures with Jerusalem street cats over the last 14 years. She is a professor of government at the Hebrew University, focusing on politicaly philosophy.

This is a very sweet book, which reveals quite a bit about the author as well as the cats she writes about. She writes about the first cat who came to her garden - Kitsoshi, about how families of cats established themselves in her garden and in the cat pergola which she set up for them, about the friendship between cats (including two female cats who raised their kittens together), about the trauma when her neighbors become angry with her because she had so many cats in the garden and she has to send some of them away, about the territories of cats, about how the mothers train their kittens to be good hunters, etc. In the back of the book she gives several cat genealogies, including one for Kitzoshi. She gets very involved in the life of the cats, worries about them, raises abandoned kittens by hand, cries when they die - she is truly a fine cat lady and expresses well the untoward affection that some of us develop for cats.

Elms in the Yard, a Jerusalem blog, frequently posts photos of Jerusalem cats.

To the left is a photo I took in 2004 of a street cat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

More on cats

A friend just stopped by and told me about one of her projects while she's here in Jerusalem - she's photographing one cat a day and sending the picture to her daughter back home in the U.S. I told her about my interest in cat ancestry and the link between domestic cats and wildcats from the Middle East, which made me go back and look again at the New York Times article from 2007 that first piqued my interest in this question. The Times website provides a link to the article in Science from which the information was taken. Amidst the technique discussion of genetics, which I was not able to follow very well, there were some little poetic gems that expressed the conclusions of the article in more understandable language.

The domestic cat may be the world's most numerous pet, yet little is certain of the cat's origin. Archaeological remains and anthropological clues suggest that, unlike species domesticated for agriculture (e.g., cow, pig, and sheep) or transport (horse and donkey), the cat probably began its association with humans as a commensal, feeding on the rodent pests that infested the grain stores of the first farmers. The earliest evidence of cat-human association involves their co-occurrence in Cyprus deposits determined to be 9500 years old. Domestic cats are generally considered to have descended from the Old World wildcats, but they differ from these hypothesized progenitors in behavior, tameness, and coat color diversity....

These 15 individuals [Middle Eastern wildcats] had concordant mtDNA and STR phylogenies identical to those of domestic cats and were collected in remote deserts of Israel, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia. These data suggest that these Near Eastern wildcats may represent the ancestral founder population of domestic cats, supporting a domestication origin in the Near East....

The domestication of wild species to complement human civilization stands as one of the more successful "biological experiments" ever undertaken. For cats, the process began more than 9000 years ago when the earliest farmers of the Fertile Crescent domesticated grains and cereals as well as livestock. In parallel, the endemic wildcats of the region may have adapted by both regulating the rodents in the grain stores and abandoning their aggressive wild-born behaviors. The archaeological imprints left in the genomes of living cats here weigh into inferences about the timing, steps, and provenance of domestication—a dynamic exercise depicted in art, in history, and in human cultural development since recorded evidence began.

Much more pleasant to contemplate than humans rioting!

More on the domestication of cats

An article in the June 2009 issue of Scientific American is about The Taming of the Cat. It seems that they first became domesticated about 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent.

The results revealed five genetic clusters, or lineages, of wildcats. Four of these lineages corresponded neatly with four of the known subspecies of wildcat and dwelled in specific places: F. silvestris silvestris in Europe, F. s. bieti in China, F. s. ornata in Central Asia and F. s. cafra in southern Africa. The fifth lineage, however, included not only the fifth known subspecies of wildcat—F. s. lybica in the Middle East—but also the hundreds of domestic cats that were sampled, including purebred and mixed-breed felines from the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. In fact, genetically, F. s. lybica wildcats collected in remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were virtually indistinguishable from domestic cats. That the domestic cats grouped with F. s. lybica alone among wildcats meant that domestic cats arose in a single locale, the Middle East, and not in other places where wildcats are common.

Evidence suggesting a date about 10,000 years ago includes:

In 2004 Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues reported unearthing the earliest evidence suggestive of humans keeping cats as pets. The discovery comes from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where 9,500 years ago an adult human of unknown gender was laid to rest in a shallow grave. An assortment of items accompanied the body—stone tools, a lump of iron oxide, a handful of seashells and, in its own tiny grave just 40 centimeters away, an eight-month-old cat, its body oriented in the same westward direction as the human’s.

And why did they become domesticated?

Early settlements in the Fertile Crescent between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, created a completely new environment for any wild animals that were sufficiently flexible and inquisitive (or scared and hungry) to exploit it. The house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, was one such creature. Archaeologists have found remains of this rodent, which originated in the Indian subcontinent, among the first human stores of wild grain from Israel, which date to around 10,000 years ago. The house mice could not compete well with the local wild mice outside, but by moving into people’s homes and silos, they thrived.

It is almost certainly the case that these house mice attracted cats. But the trash heaps on the outskirts of town were probably just as great a draw, providing year-round pickings for those felines resourceful enough to seek them out. Both these food sources would have encouraged cats to adapt to living with people; in the lingo of evolutionary biology, natural selection favored those cats that were able to cohabitate with humans and thereby gain access to the trash and mice.

And how did they become deities in Egypt?

Testament to full domestication comes from a much later period. A nearly 3,700-year-old ivory cat statuette from Israel suggests the cat was a common sight around homes and villages in the Fertile Crescent before its introduction to Egypt. This scenario makes sense, given that all the other domestic animals (except the donkey) and plants were introduced to the Nile Valley from the Fertile Crescent. But it is Egyptian paintings from the so-called New Kingdom period—Egypt’s golden era, which began nearly 3,600 years ago—that provide the oldest known unmistakable depictions of full domestication. These paintings typically show cats poised under chairs, sometimes collared or tethered, and often eating from bowls or feeding on scraps. The abundance of these illustrations signifies that cats had become common members of Egyptian households by this time.

It is in large part as a result of evocative images such as these that scholars traditionally perceived ancient Egypt as the locus of cat domestication. Even the oldest Egyptian representations of wildcats are 5,000 to 6,000 years younger than the 9,500-year-old Cypriot burial, however. Although ancient Egyptian culture cannot claim initial domestication of the cat among its many achievements, it surely played a pivotal role in subsequently molding the domestication dynamic and spreading cats throughout the world. Indeed, the Egyptians took the love of cats to a whole new level. By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

There's still no explanation, however, of why cats are not mentioned in the Bible!

Searches - Ayers, Cats, Temple Mount

It's always interesting to see how people get to this blog. One of the most consistent searches that ends up here is for Bernardine Dohrn and/or Bill Ayers. Another perennial favorite is my post on cats in the Bible. Another one is my photos of the Temple Mount.

So, for those interested in Bill Ayers - here are all the posts: Bill Ayers.

For those interested in Bernardine Dohrn - Bernardine Dohrn.

Cats in the Bible - Cats & Bible.

Or, on the other hand, just cats: Cats. Although you will find a truly random selection of posts in which the word appears, not only those centered on cats. Also photos of my cat, Zachary.

As for the Temple Mount - click here and you'll find all of my posts that mention it, including some photographs. If you'd like to see all my photos of the Temple Mount that are online, go to Picasa - Temple Mount Summer 2007. I didn't manage to visit the Temple Mount this summer, however.

Ancient cats & the Bible

Today's New York Times has a great story on the origin of the domestic cat - and as we all suspected, cats domesticated themselves, we did not domesticate them.

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village. And from these five matriarchs all the world’s 600 million house cats are descended.

A scientific basis for this scenario has been established by Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and his colleagues. He spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat in places as far apart as Scotland, Israel, Namibia and Mongolia. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats and of many house cats and fancy cats.

Five subspecies of wildcat are distributed across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into five clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues said in a report published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say. The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, a type that is passed down through the female line. Since the oldest archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, which could account for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.

Cats are “indicators of human cultural adolescence,” he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering, their way of life for millions of years, to settled communities.

Last week at Shabbat lunch with friends and fellow cat-lovers, we were discussing the puzzling fact that the Bible does not mention domesticated cats, although there surely must have been cats living in Israelite towns and villages. There are a number of words in the Bible for larger cats - more than one word for lion, and for leopard - but not for house cats. This discovery only deepens the mystery. Other animals are mentioned - dogs and mice, for example - but not the cat.

Such a topic naturally comes up in Jerusalem because the city is overrun by feral cats. Thin cats and their kittens can be found near every rubbish bin, and it can be quite startling to walk by one and suddenly hear and see an explosion of cats fleeing in all directions.

Baghdad in Gaza

Khaled Abu Toameh in the Jerusalem Post reports that Bearded Gazans on razor's edge between life and death.

Once, Hamas members were afraid to wear beards for fear of being arrested by Israel's security forces. Today, they are once again afraid of appearing in public with beards - this time for fear that they will be killed or kidnapped by Fatah militiamen in the Gaza Strip.

Sources close to Hamas said over the weekend that at least 10 bearded men have been shot and killed in the past week after being stopped in the street by Fatah gunmen.

One case was caught on camera and has since appeared on the Youtube Web site. The film shows several Fatah gunmen shooting a bearded man in the legs. As the man lies in a pool of blood in the street crying for help, a Fatah gunman approaches him and fires at his head from an automatic rifle, killing him instantly.

"This man was just an ordinary citizen who happened to wear a beard," said a Hamas official. "It's become very dangerous to appear with a beard on the streets of the Gaza Strip."

According to the Hamas official, most of the victims were killed execution-style by Fatah militiamen and members of various Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority security forces.

I remember several years ago some people in Israel and some American Jews saying that they just wanted to wall off Gaza and let the Palestinians kill each other there, with the thought that what happened to the Palestinians didn't really matter. I wonder what those people are saying today, when hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in Fatah-Hamas fighting this year. Are we not our brothers' keeper? Should we not care that life for people in Gaza - including innocents - has become a living hell, aided and abetted by the Israeli blockade of Gaza and by the American embargo on aid to the Hamas government? I don't want suicide bombers to be able to enter Israel from Gaza, nor do I want to support Hamas, which still has the declared goal of destroying Israel - but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this has nothing to do with us and our actions.

Some more catblogging

I seem to have entered the netherland of the blog world - talking about my cat. So much for politics or religion.... Today was the beginning of our spring break (not that it's actually spring out there or anything - in my opinion, spring in Ithaca actually begins on May 1, which is generally when we begin to see some serious flowers blooming) and I'm visiting my family in Cambridge. On my way, I brought my cat to a new kennel, since the old one has closed down (alas). The new one is in Freeville, about a half hour drive from my home. The poor creature miaowed the whole way there, and then when we finally got to the kennel, he sat in his box looking unhappy. This kennel (which is actually a vet hospital that also boards cats) has a couple of cats living on the premises who were rescued from bad situations - one lacks an eye, the other one lacks a hind leg. The legless cat jumped up on top of my cat's carrier, much displeasing my cat. Then we brought him over to the little room where he'll be living with a number of other cats until next Monday - in such a small space! He'll get out at some time during the day to spend some time in a larger cage with things to play with. Still, he'll be happy when I come to pick him up next week.

Even more snow!

Well, I didn't manage to take any pictures, but I did just come back inside from shoveling the walk a third time today. I think about 2 feet of snow fell last night and today. A lot to shovel. The end of the street where my house is has not yet been plowed at all, in fact was plowed in by the snowplow going down the bigger street, so I think I'll probably have to take the bus to work tomorrow. (Somehow I don't think we can expect a second snow day....)

It's so quiet outside too. Just some light snow falling, occasional wind gusts, and every now and then a car. I live fairly close to one of the major highways that goes by Ithaca, and I can usually hear cars on it - but not now!

My cat will come over and jump on me and miaow, making me think that he wants to go outside, but every time I give him the opportunity, he sits in the doorway and just stares at all the snow.

New Cat Photos!