Conquering the World

In mapping the spread of the cat, one of the most significant finds comes from a tomb in Cyprus, thought to be the remains of an African wildcat, Felis libyca, dating from about 5000 BC
 
This cat, which must have been imported, was a domestic animal but still as large as  a wildcat. It seems that the cat reached India, probably with Phoenician traders, by 500 BC, and in all likelihood even earlier: the two Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana both mention the cat, and are dated c. 300 BC.

It is, however, much harder to map the arrival of the domestic cat in countries of Asia. Dates vary between 2000 BC and AD 400 for the cat's arrival in China and Southeast Asia, while the traditional date of AD 999 for Japan does seem rather late considering the proximity of these lands.

The comparatively late arrival of the cat in Europe was undoubtedly due to the embargo that the Egyptians placed on this sacred animal. But with the advent of Christianity, the cat traveled north with the expanding Roman Empire, eventually reaching southern Russia and northern Europe around AD 100.

A cat skeleton excavated from a Roman villa at Lullingstone in southeast England supports this theory. Around the same time, cats arrived in Norway under a different escort, possibly accompanying returning mercenaries from Byzantium (now Istanbul). Surprisingly, it took another 400 years for the cat to reach Latvia, by which time cats were being traded freely throughout most of Europe.

There was then a very long period before the cat embarked on its voyage to the New World. Although French Jesuits took cats to Quebec in the 1500s, and at least one cat accompanied the Pilgrims to America on the Mayflower (1620), it was not until the 1700s that cats appeared in the New World in appreciable numbers, when settlers in