Cats on Mount Sinai

Stories of the Monastery’s Furry Residents

Years ago, when I visited St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, among many impressive things about this monastery, the cats who lived their caught my attention. They wandered freely throughout the monastery, seemingly at home among monks, visitors, and tourists. They enjoyed food and play, and at certain times they simply gathered near the back door of the kitchen, apparently waiting for their share. What struck me most was that the monastery seemed to be much more a place for cats than for dogs. The latter were barely to be seen inside.

When I began reading the accounts of European travellers and pilgrims who visited St. Catherine’s, I realized that I was not the first person to notice the monastery’s cats. Traveller after traveller commented on their presence. Some simply mentioned them; others observed how the monks treated them, speculated about their origins, or even told stories about individual cats.

These scattered observations interested me so much that I began to collect them. Since the world celebrates this week the International Cat Day, it is convenient to share in what follows some glimpses of the cats that I encountered while reading European accounts of journeys to St. Catherine’s Monastery—and, more broadly, of travels in Egypt.

Cats at the back door of the Kitchen, St. Catherine’s Monastery 2016. ©Vevian Zaki

Cats and monks at St. Catherine’s

The cats of St. Catherine’s attracted particular attention. During his visit to the monastery in 1869, Henry Palmer (1840-1882) described the cats as a “legion”—that is, a remarkably large number. He was especially interested in the way the monks cared for them. According to his account, after the monks had finished their meals, a bell was rung and the cats gathered at a particular place to receive their food.¹

Horatius Bonar (1808–1889), another traveller to Sinai, also noticed the difference between the animals inside and outside the monastery. As he made his way into the surrounding area, he wrote:

I took the way which led circuitously up the mount, but was saluted at the outset by half a dozen of dogs, who seem as plentiful outside as cats are within²

Bonar made several other observations about the monastery’s cats. At one point, he came across a group of monks playing with a whole crowd of them. He described the scene with a certain degree of amusement, and perhaps sarcasm, suggesting that playing with cats seemed to be the monks’ only occupation.³

His account also contains an intriguing description of the cats themselves. He referred to them as “cropt-eared” and “cropt-tailed.” At first glance, this might suggest that this is the result of a deliberate cut or a cruel accident that reached their ears or tails. However, the warm atmosphere between monks and cats that he himself described does not imply such situation. Additionally, the description could also refer to naturally occurring characteristics. Some cat breeds have naturally folded ears or extremely short or absent tails such as the Highlander cats and the Scottish Fold. This is intriguing as these kind of cats are not known in the Egyptian environment nowadays. If Bonar’s description was not simply a product of his imagination, it would certainly be interesting to know more about the cats living in Sinai at the time, and how some of the characteristics noted by travellers have since disappeared.

Cats were not simply furry inhabitants of the monastery. Travellers also recognized an important practical role for them. One of their most frequently mentioned benefits was their ability to keep away unwanted creatures, particularly mice, rats, and scorpions.

In one account, travellers on their way to Sinai stopped at the castle of Aqaba, which was known for its scorpions. Yet, according to the account, they encountered none. The reason, they were told, was the enormous number of cats living there, which apparently kept the scorpions under control.⁴

The practical importance of cats also emerges in travellers’ discussions of the rules and restrictions associated with St. Catherine’s. The rather strict image of the monastery sometimes presented to the outside world was that women, and even female animals and birds, were not permitted within its walls. Given the enormous number of cats they encountered there, travellers regarded such claims with skepticism. Surely, they joked, the monks could not live without female cats..⁵

There is, in other words, an interesting tension in these accounts. The monastery was imagined as a strictly controlled sacred space, with rules governing what could enter it. Yet cats seemed to cross those boundaries freely.

Cats on the Road to St. Catherine’s

Travel accounts also preserve some more personal—and sometimes sad—stories about cats. Palmer and his fellow travellers, for example, passed by the abandoned house of Major MacDonald, a British person who had spent some time living in the deserts of Sinai and had built a house there. His companion was a cat called “Blackie,” whom the Major had apparently picked up somewhere around the Red Sea. It seems that when MacDonald eventually left the area, Blackie was left behind. Palmer and his companions later found the remains of the unfortunate cat near the only place it had known as home.⁶

Since the travellers to Sinai, shared sometimes part of the road with the hajj caravan, they told another story that appears in several travel accounts: A woman who travelled with the Hajj caravan from Egypt across the deserts to Mecca accompanied by her cats. She was known as umm al-qiṭaṭ or the “Mother of Cats.”⁷ There is no way to establish whether the story is historically accurate, but its repeated appearance in travellers’ accounts is itself significant. Whether or not the woman actually existed as described, the story reflects contemporary perceptions of cats and the care that some people were believed to show them.

Cats between Ancient and Modern Egypt

Travellers to Egypt could hardly avoid the subject of cats. When they were not describing living cats, they encountered them in another form: as statues and mummies from ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. These remains reminded European visitors of the reverence that ancient Egyptians had shown toward cats. Indeed, the history and significance of cats in ancient Egypt have generated a substantial body of modern scholarship.⁸ This ancient history was also part of the travellers’ imagination. Alexandre Dumas, for example, in his Voyage en Égypte, imagined himself in a tomb near the Pyramid of Saqqara, carrying an ibis under his right arm and a cat under his left—both of them mummified remains that he humorously treated as former deities.⁹

Several travellers commented on what they understood to be the special relationship between Egyptians and cats. They noted that cats had once been worshipped in Egypt and observed that they continued to enjoy a privileged place in Egyptian households.¹⁰ William Beamont (1797–1889), for example, was amused by the Arabic words for cats, qiṭṭ and biss, which he found remarkably close to the English “cat” and “puss.” He wondered how an animal that had once enjoyed divine status in ancient Egypt had come to be known by such perfectly ordinary and, to his ears, rather funny terms.¹¹

Cats in the monastery gather around food provided by a tourist. St. Cathrine’s Monastery 2019 ©Vevian Zaki

Cats might be the last thing a visitor to a monastery would think of or expect to see. And yet, the cats of Sinai have made themselves part of the monastery scene. They have prompted scholars and pilgrims to notice and record their presence, whether alive or dead, and to reflect on the benefits they brought—or, sometimes, the harm they caused.

I keep wondering whether the cats I saw at the monastery, gathering around the kitchen in search of warmth and food, might be descendants of those cats who, centuries ago, came running when they heard the dinner bell.

It seems that patterns live on and continue not only among humans, but among cats as well.

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1. Palmer, The Desrerts, Part I, 71 ↩︎
2. Bonar, 222. ↩︎
3. Bonar, 224. ↩︎
4. Robinson, Biblical Researches, 242-243. ↩︎
5. Ebers, Durch Gosen, 264. ↩︎
6. Palmer, The Desert, Part I, 201. ↩︎
7. Ebers, Durch Gosen, 484-485; Bartlett, Forty Days, 158-159. ↩︎
8. See for example Henty, The Cat of Bubastes; Jaromir, The cat in ancient Egypt. ↩︎
9. Dumas, Impressions de voyage, 24. ↩︎
10. Baedeker, Egypt, lxxviii. ↩︎
11. Beamont, To Sinai, 190. ↩︎

Keywords: Cats, European Travellers, St. Catherine’s Monastery

Arabic translation of this text here الترجمة العربية لهذا النص هنا

Suggested Citation: Vevian Zaki (13 August 2026). ” Cats on Mount Sinai: ” Margins Speak Blog (https://vevianzaki.com/2026/08/13/cats-on-mount-sinai/).