A Michael Broad Blog
This is a fascinating – and slightly horrifying – story from the 19th century. 🙀 Here’s the story: in the 1800s, there was a booming trade in mummies and mummy parts. Egyptians mummified a lot of animals, especially cats, which were sacred creatures in their culture. Victorians, however, didn’t see these mummies as cultural …
Egyptair handlers managed to totally mess up the transportation a rescue cats from Egypt to America. They were transporting, in a cargo flight, 12 Egyptian street cats some of which were disabled. That’s not uncommon for Egyptian street cats as you might imagine because life is so hard in a country where there are …
NEWS AND NEWS-CAIRO, EGYPT: This cute and confident calico cat became a social media star in Egypt when she gatecrashed the Cairo Film Festival (19-28 November 2020). She hobnobbed with the rich and famous on the red catwalk (excuse the pun). The film stars enjoyed her presence and interacted with her. It is the …
Answer: shaving the eyebrows to mourn the passing of their cat, is a clear signal to others. Some background information on the relationship between ancient Egyptians and animals helps, I think, to understand the practice of shaving eyebrows on the death of a cat at that time. The quote comes from Herodotus, an ancient …
NEWS AND VIEWS (COMMENT): A trainee male nurse working at an Egyptian hospital was taking a much needed break outside the hospital after a 12-hour continuous shift which he had been subjected to for the last 20 days. The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on medics. The guy’s name is Ahmed Flaty. …
ANALYSIS: Exhuming ancient Egyptian coffins and mummies is disrespectful. It is desecrating old burial grounds. Today, splashed all over the online news media is the story that Egyptian experts have unearthed 13 sealed wooden coffins in the desert necropolis of Saqqara. They’ve been there buried deep underground in the sand for two and half …
This photograph shows a veterinarian and assistant taking a throat swab (oropharyngeal swab) at a clinic in Cairo, Egypt from a domestic cat because it is a requirement for travel. The photograph is by Maya Alleruzzo and circulated by the agency AP. Testing, in fact, requires more than one swab. It requires swabs from …
The online newspaper, Middle East Eye, reports that the authorities in Egypt have obtained licences to export 2,400 cats and 1,700 dogs to an unknown destination, for an unknown purpose at that destination. There is, though, one certainty and that is the authorities are concerned about the number of stray dogs and cats on …
