CATS! meow :3

...when the Egyptians started identifying the lions that roamed around their land with the Sun. They believed that at sunset, Ra, the Sun God, would die and descend through the underworld in the West, to be born again in the East, at sunrise. During the night, however Ra was always in great danger, as his enemies, headed by the great serpent Apophis would not hesitate to attack him, thus putting the whole Universe in danger.


cats in islamic countries are considered to be very clean animals. The Prophet Mohammed is said to have kept cats himself, and popular legend tells that one time, the Prophet had to respect the call to prayer, but his cat was sleeping on the sleeve of his robe.  Rather than awake the cat, the Prophet simply tore his sleeve, and went of to prayer.


has its origins in Malaysia, where people believed the cat would help souls journey from Hell (in this case, the equivalent of the Christian Purgatory) to Paradise. The punishment for killing a cat was to carry and stack as many coconut tree trunks as the cat had hairs. (Talk about deforestation!)


the cats in noah's ark have been the subject of many folk legends.  Such legends are not as well established as the previous mythological accounts referred to.  Nevertheless, they are not less interesting.  According to one of these, at the time of the flood, Noah took pairs of rats and mice too. However, the rodents multiplied very quickly and the Ark was, after a while, infested by rodents. Noah consulted the lion, who as king of the beasts may have known a solution. The lion sneezed and from his nostrils, a pair of ready made domestic cats came out, who instantly set down to work, having a natural instinct for being "verminators".

Sometimes, it is said that God created the cat, but that the mouse is the Devil's work. The Devil's mouse set out to destroy all life forms by gnawing a hole in the Ark. However, God's cat saved the day by killing the mouse, and a frog crept in the hole, thus getting it's amphibian tendencies, by being in contact with water and dry wood simultaneously.

Yet another Noah's Ark cat legend is that of the Manx cat, who has no tail because it was unpunctual in its arrival to the Ark, and the careless Noah closed it's tail in the door of the Ark. Well, after all he was only human, ey?