Jun 16, 2026 · 19 min · 14 segments
Cats have been worshipped, feared, smuggled onto ships, awarded military medals, and even used in ancient warfare. In this solo episode, Molly dives into some of the most obscure, surprising, and…
We're in ancient Egypt, and cats weren't just pets at this time, right? They were sacred animals.
And the Egyptians found themselves in an impossible situation, right? Do they fire arrows and risk harming their sacred animals, or do they, you know, hold back? And according to the story, many of them hesitated, so much so that the Persians won the battle, captured Pelusium, and eventually took control of Egypt.
Now, historians will debate exactly how much of that story is literal versus symbolic, but ancient accounts, you know, aren't always as reliable, of course, as our modern reporting with, you know, recording devices and things like that we can point to.
But whether every detail happened exactly as described, the story tells us something important, and that is that the relationship between humans and cats was already powerful enough over 2,500 years ago that military strategists considered it worth exploiting.
We're in ancient Egypt, and cats weren't just pets at this time, right? They were sacred animals.
And the Egyptians found themselves in an impossible situation, right? Do they fire arrows and risk harming their sacred animals, or do they, you know, hold back? And according to the story, many of them hesitated, so much so that the Persians won the battle, captured Pelusium, and eventually took control of Egypt.
Now, historians will debate exactly how much of that story is literal versus symbolic, but ancient accounts, you know, aren't always as reliable, of course, as our modern reporting with, you know, recording devices and things like that we can point to.
But whether every detail happened exactly as described, the story tells us something important, and that is that the relationship between humans and cats was already powerful enough over 2,500 years ago that military strategists considered it worth exploiting.
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