Snarf

The Hana stela is a small painted limestone funerary panel of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, conventionally dated to the late Eleventh Dynasty around 2000 BCE. Its findspot is reported in the early-twentieth-century excavation literature as the Theban necropolis, although the precise tomb is no longer locatable; the object now resides in the Egyptian Museum collection. The standing figure of the official Hana is shown receiving offerings, with a small feline rendered in profile beneath his chair. The hieroglyphic inscription beside the cat has been read since the early twentieth century as the personal name Bouhaki, occasionally transliterated as Bouhakhi. The reading itself is contested. Egyptologist Jaromir Malek, formerly of the Griffith Institute at Oxford, treated the inscription cautiously in his 1993 study The Cat in Ancient Egypt, noting that the determinative signs are ambiguous and the name could alternatively be parsed as an epithet rather than a personal name. Even if read as a name, the stela does not unambiguously identify the animal as the household pet of Hana rather than as a symbolic motif. Subsequent surveys by Salima Ikram (Choice Cuts: Meat Production in Ancient Egypt, 1995) and by Stéphane Pasquali in his 2017 review of Middle Kingdom animal naming practices have repeated the cautious framing. If the reading is accepted, Bouhaki precedes by some seven centuries the better-known named cat of the New Kingdom courtier Puimre (c. 1450 BCE), whose Theban tomb TT39 shows a tabby labelled Nedjem under the owner's chair. Both predate the more elaborate cat iconography of the eighteenth-dynasty tomb of Nebamun (c. 1350 BCE) at the British Museum. Bouhaki is consequently cited in many introductory surveys of Egyptian cat history as the earliest individually named domestic cat in the historical record, with the caveat that the philological reading is not universally settled and that direct skeletal evidence for cat domestication in Egypt only becomes secure in the New Kingdom.