I can imagine the Egyptians like cat pictures like people today. However, the statutes don't look like the most beautiful of cats. Have the aesthetics of cat pictures changed over time?
Egyptian art had very different conventions and esthetics. But also the cats themselves seem to be different (larger, IIRC, and different colored than the European cats you're probably more familiar with). If you want to take a look at all the kinds of cat-related artwork (including cartoons which I can only call cat memes, like artwork of rats laying siege to a cat fortress or cats whipping a human for unknown offenses), take a look at all the illustrations in Malek's _The Cat in Ancient Egypt_. You can get a high-quality scan from, ahem, the usual place.
One interesting thing about the cat mummies here is that they'll provide additional datapoints on how well fed temple-sacrificial cats were and how they were killed. And perhaps at some point some ancient DNA can be sequenced? Which will give interesting data about how domesticated they were. Bradshaw in _Cat Sense_ argues that the core work of domesticating cats was accomplished by the Ancient Egyptians as a byproduct of their large-scale breeding, necessary for the raising the vast volumes of cats to be sacrificed as offerings.
Underscores usually means underline the words they're around. I believe underlining book titles is a MLA format thing (brb highschool english class flashbacks).
It's a little deeper than that, cats were revered because they killed snakes, scorpions, rats, etc, around the house that did harm, pharaoh's having a particularity good pick of the litter, breeding was a part of temple life.
There is an [ancient] Egyptian museum near where I live. Mummies, trinkets, sarcophagi, other artefacts. The cats pictured in the article are in line with what is in the museum, in both sarcophagus and trinket form.
I know this does doesn't quite answer your "changed over time" question, but it is a data point.
I'd put it differently. Not that aesthetics have changed, rather that the technique of displaying what you see (through painting or sculpting) has gone through considerable evolution since the days of the pharaohs. And thus the aesthetics of things were a result of that.
If they want more tourism dollars they should just let YouTubers decide where to dig. As long as it’s not damaging anything, it doesn’t cost anything to look at things people are curious about.
And who decides that? The people receiving ad money for producing entertaining content that people want to watch? The armchair archaeologists watching the videos? The platform on which the video is hosted, who is heavily incentivized to host entertaining content that people want to watch?
The Egyptian antiquities authority would obviously need to do the excavations themselves or oversee them, I’m just saying the process could be democratized a little.
There are hundreds of square miles of sites, letting armchair archeologists vote on what should be looked at isn’t going to break anything.
why would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert knowledge? The last thing the world needs is Jake Paul directing archaeologists to dig in the middle of a desert that was never inhabited.
> why would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert knowledge?
To get more tourist dollars. Think of it as a loss leader. You allocate 0.1% of your archeology budget to humor the amateur Egyptologist YouTubers with the most subscribers, and then engages a whole new generation who then want to visit for themselves.
If the guy who runs the Ancient Architects YouTube channel thinks there might be a secret entrance to the pyramid behind a specific stone, fly him out and let him go up there and check it out. It's not like the whole thing is going to fall over if he runs some tests on it or tries to see if one of the stones is movable, people have been climbing it for thousands of years.
