Egypt’s Sacred Cats Lived Hard Lives, and Skulls From Beni Hassan Show Disease and Injury

Ancient Egyptians mummified millions of animals as offerings to the gods, and cats counted among the most common. A new study of skulls from one of those cat cemeteries suggests the animals did not live easy lives before they became sacred offerings. Many showed signs of disease, and a minority carried injuries from fights with other cats or from blows by people.

A forgotten collection in Vienna

The skulls come from Beni Hassan, a burial site along the Nile in Middle Egypt. In the late 19th century, workers unwrapped cat mummies from the site, and the Natural History Museum in Vienna bought 131 of the skulls in 1883. Archive letters from a dealer name Beni Hassan as the source. The authors call the group the largest museum collection of Egyptian cat skulls with a documented origin.

Wim Van Neer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and KU Leuven led the work with Bea De Cupere and Cristiano Ottoni. They published it in the Journal of Archaeological Science under the title “Keeping cats for mummification in ancient Egypt: osteological evidence from Beni Hassan.”

What the skulls show

Of the 131 skulls, 113 belonged to adults, 7 to subadults and 11 to juveniles. Seven skulls came from jungle cats, a larger wild species. The rest mostly came from house cats, although some may belong to African wildcats or hybrids.

The team found at least one pathological condition on 81 skulls, about 62 percent. These included gum disease on 26 skulls, tooth loss on 24 and tartar on 22. The authors say dental problems matched or fell below the rates in modern feral cats. Thirty-five skulls had pitting on the bone surface, and 8 had a rough surface. The authors suggest skin infections in crowded conditions could explain some of this. Another 19 skulls had small holes in the floor of the eye socket. They resemble a human condition linked to anemia, but only skulls survive, so the cause in cats stays unclear.

Bites, blades and blows

Fourteen skulls, about 11 percent, showed trauma. Eight carried puncture marks that fit bites from other cats, and three of those had healed. One house cat had healed punctures that match the canines of a jungle cat. Other skulls showed hack marks from a sharp metal tool, or fractures and dents from a blunt object, possibly a thick wooden stick.

So the injury share is smaller than the disease share. The “more than half” figure applies to all pathologies, mostly dental and skeletal, and not to injuries alone.

The authors read two of the wounds as fatal. Three or four cats survived blows to the head. They say some blows could reflect discipline or an attempt to separate fighting animals, but the fatal ones were meant to kill. The study does not claim that every cat died by violence, and the skulls alone cannot show why a given blow happened.

Dating the cats

The team radiocarbon dated nine skulls. Eight fall between about 380 and 40 BCE, spanning the late Late Period and the Ptolemaic era. One skull dates to roughly 980 to 820 BCE, in the Third Intermediate Period. No known text records cat mummies at Beni Hassan that early. The authors say this may mean mummification there began earlier than thought, unless that skull came from another site such as Bubastis. Because only nine skulls got dated, the 380 to 40 BCE range describes those nine, not all 131.

Crowded, and some wild caught

Chemical signatures in four jungle cats and twelve house cats point to different early habitats. Jungle cats had carbon values consistent with a wetland or river setting. The authors conclude those animals were caught in the wild, not bred in captivity. Both jungle cats and house cats showed disease and injury, and six of the seven jungle cats had a pathology. The authors take this to suggest all the cats lived under similar stressful, probably confined conditions. That fits a picture of cats kept in numbers for the temple trade in votive animals, though the skulls cannot show exactly how the animals were housed.

Why it matters, and the limits

The result adds physical evidence to a trade that texts only hint at. It also gives the first reported cases of healed and unhealed cat-on-cat bite wounds in Egyptological literature, according to the project team.

The caveats matter. Only skulls survive, so diagnoses rest on less evidence than a full skeleton would give. The sample skews toward adults, probably because early zoologists preferred them, while X-ray studies of mummies elsewhere show mostly young cats. Provenance relies on archive letters. Egyptologist Julia Troche of Missouri State University, who did not take part in the study, told Gizmodo that Egyptian history spans more than 3,000 years, so it is hard to say the Egyptians thought one thing about cats. The findings do not prove that Egyptians as a whole treated cats badly, and they leave open what the people at Beni Hassan intended.

Sources

• Van Neer, W., De Cupere, B. and Ottoni, C. (2026), “Keeping cats for mummification in ancient Egypt: osteological evidence from Beni Hassan,” Journal of Archaeological Science 196, 106733. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2026.106733 (ScienceDirect)
• Phys.org, “Egyptian cats meant for the gods led harsh lives, extensive museum collection reveals”
• ERC FELIX project summary
• Gizmodo, 10 November 2026
• Archaeology Magazine coverage

Image credit: ERC FELIX project, figure from Van Neer et al. (2026).