The Gayer-Anderson Cat is an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat, which dates from the Late Period (around 664–332 BC). It is made of bronze, with

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...

ornaments.

Style and detail

Scan the World - Gayer Anderson Cat, British Museum

The sculpture is known as the Gayer-Anderson cat after Major Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson who, together with Mary Stout Shaw, donated it to the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. The statue is a representation of the female cat deity

Bastet Bastet or Bast ( egy, bꜣstjt, cop, Ⲟⲩⲃⲁⲥⲧⲉ, Oubaste , Phoenician: 𐤀𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: ’bst, or 𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: bst) was a goddess of ancient Egyptian religion, worshipped as early as the Second Dynasty (2 ...

. The cat wears

jewellery Jewellery ( UK) or jewelry (U.S.) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a wester ...

and a protective wedjat amulet. The earrings and nose ring on the statue may not have always belonged to the cat. A scarab appears on the head and a winged scarab is shown on the chest. The statue is 42 cm high and 13 cm wide. A copy of the statue is kept in the Gayer-Anderson Museum, located in

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the Capital city, capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, List of ...

.Gayer-Anderson Cat
Ancient Egypt.co.uk, retrieved 6 December 2014

Construction

Gayer-Anderson Cat in British Museum by Glenn Ashton

The statue is not as well preserved as it appears.

X-ray An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nb ...

s taken of the sculpture reveal that there are cracks that extend almost completely around the centre of the cat's body, and only an internal system of strengthening prevents the cat's head from falling off. The repairs to the cat were carried out by Major Gayer-Anderson, who was a keen restorer of antiquities in the 1930s. When he bought it, the surface of the cat was "covered with a heavy coating of crystalline

verdigris Verdigris is the common name for blue-green, copper-based pigments that form a patina on copper, bronze, and brass. The technical literature is ambiguous as to its chemical composition. Some sources refer to "neutral verdigris" as copper(II) ...

and crisp flakes of red patina" which he carefully chipped away. The cat was manufactured by the

lost wax Lost-wax casting (also called "investment casting", "precision casting", or ''cire perdue'' which has been adopted into English from the French, ) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture (often silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is ...

method, where a wax model is covered with clay and fired in a kiln until the wax flows out, and the hollow mould is refilled with molten metal. In this case the metal was 85% copper, 13% tin, 2% arsenic with a 0.2% trace of lead. The remains of the pins that held the wax core can still be seen using X-rays. The original metalworkers would have been able to create a range of colours on a bronze casting and the stripes on the tail are due to metal of a differing composition. It is also considered likely that the eyes contained stone or glass decorations.

References

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Style and detail

Construction

References

Further reading