Kitty was a orange, mackerel tabby. Knowing little about tabbies, and stricken with an urge to know more after he died, I went searching for his roots, following a tangled trail that led him to us.

The first thing I learned is that tabby is not the name of a breed, but of a feline coat pattern. There are many variations of the pattern of which mackerel is a popular one. Popular cats in contemporary American culture such as Garfield, Morris (from the cat commercials) and of course, Hobbes, are orange, mackerel tabbies. Some say the distinctive coat pattern he possessed is indicative of his direct descent from the original African wild cats. He so resembled a tiger, we often called him bonsai tiger.

The story of tabbies begins about 9,000 years or so ago, with the domestication of cats, initially in the Fertile Crescent. Until recently, the prevailing wisdom was that cats were deliberately raised and bred by humans for their rodent catching skills. According to an article in the Discover magazine published last January, a geneticist Carlos Driscoll posits that the rodents were responsible for the domestication of the cat. Based on a study of genetic material from around 1000 domestic and wild cats, he points out that the domestication took place over a long period, that it arose in parallel with the emergence of agriculture, agriculture that led to large food stockpiles which led to rats and cats followed the rats. So, cats friendly to humans possessed an evolutionary advantage over cats that were not as friendly. This is what led to the domestication of cats instead of deliberate breeding by humans. “Cats weren’t domesticated on purpose, they just kind of invited themselves in,” says Driscoll.

These domesticated cats came from a strain of African wild cats. When Phoenician and Roman sailors transported these cats to Europe, they mated with their European cousins. Neither the African nor the European counterparts possessed the beautiful stripes we’ve come to love in the modern orange mackerel tabby. It was their cross-breeding that led to the pattern.

We then jump forward to the eleventh century, to Caliphate Iraq. The Abbasid caliphate ruling from Baghdad at the time is considered one of the high points of Islamic history. Iraq lay on the famous Silk Road that carried much of the trade between India, China and Europe. The Abbasid caliphs had shifted their capital to Baghdad, moving from Damascus, the capital of the previous Ummayad caliphate. Along the crowded, narrow, labyrinthine streets and quarters of Baghdad, there lay three famous silk quarters, the Nasriyah, the Attabiyah and the Dar-al-Kazz. Attabiyah was world renowned for its manufacture of a kind of striped silk taffeta. From this name, came the cropped French equivalent, tabis, and from this came the English name, tabby cat, because the Attabiyah silk resembled the tabby’s coat. The first documented usage of the phrase tabby cat is in 1695.

Eight different genes control different aspects of cat’s coat such as the pattern, the color and the length of their hair. Expression of the tabby gene creates the striped pattern of a mackerel tabby, the non-expression to the blotched pattern tabby. The agouti gene controls whether the hair between the bands is differently colored than the band. Another gene controls the orange color of the coat. Agouti genes are much more common in the African wild cats and much less so in their European cousins. In his study, Driscoll also found that while the wildcat in each region of the world formed a different sub-species, all pet cats belonged to a sub-species endemic to the Near East, the Fertile Crescent.

All tabbies have a distinctive “M” marking on their forehead. I was dumbfounded that we had never noticed such a striking mark on him. Now, we can’t help noticing it whenever we look at his pictures. There are many myths about the origin of the “M” on his forehead. In the Christian version, when Jesus lay shivering as a baby in the stable, a cat snuggled upto him and Jesus fell asleep immediately. Touched, Mary marked the cat’s forehead with her initial “M”. In the Muslim version of the story, Muezza, prophet Mohammed’s cat saved him by attacking a snake that had crawled up Mohammed’s sleeve. When it was time to go for his prayer, seeing Muezza asleep on his sleeve, a grateful Mohammed cut the sleeve off to not disturb Muezza. So, tabbies carry the mark “M” for Mohammed, as a reminder of his love for cats and that Muslims must respect and love cats. Shanthala was incredulous of the Muslim version of the story since the shape of “M” is of the Latin letter and the Arabic script is markedly different. Myths are meant to be admired for their imagination, not their verity.

I wonder if the Christian myth is post-Renaissance. In the medieval period, Europeans severely persecuted, publicly tortured and killed cats. Part of the reason lay in Christianity’s attempt to purge pre-Christian religions and their practices. Since cats were revered in many pagan religions including Welsh and Egyptian, they were targeted by the Christians. Pope Gregory IX is commonly associated with fanning the flames of this persecution. Due to the severe reduction of cats in domestic areas, rats had a heyday. Some scholars claim this to be one of the factors that led to the spread of bubonic plague, also called Black Death, which wiped out 25-50 million people in Europe alone.

This long and winding road through space and time, names and genes, the Middle East and Europe, eventually led Kitty to us, one summer night, a little over ten years ago. Unbidden, yesterday I suddenly remembered Kitty lying in the cage, the last time we went to the vet to pick him up. Although he looked tired – it was his third visit in as many days to the vet, and this time he was there the whole day – he uttered a strong meow when I asked him if he wanted to go home. He came home for the last time, one brilliant June evening, eighteen months ago, home to stay, forever in my heart.

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