Europe was a new land, ready for conquest, so the warm welcome on the northern shores of the Mediterranean further strengthened the bond between human and cat...or so we thought. Centuries of worship in Egypt had left us cats blind to the dangers ahead. This new land would later lead us to the deepest despair, for it was there that we encountered human betrayal and subsequently struggled to survive a kind of cruelty that no other species had ever experienced. But we shall leave those dark days for another part of the story, some other time. For now, we sail beneath bright, brilliant blue skies stretching over Greek ports—where Phoenician sailors unloaded their wondrous cargo.
When the first ships arrived, bringing us cats to the Greek islands, we were considered a living marvel. This happened about seven or eight centuries BC, when the Greeks were still quite a rough people, who knew only of wild cats (or weasels). We seemed wonderful to them. They were delighted by the softness of our fur and surprised by our lovely personalities. Because we allowed ourselves to be touched and even permitted humans to hold us in their arms! "They are great not just for cuddling," the Phoenician traders encouraged the excited Greeks even further, "for these cats are also truly useful!" They explained that we caught the mice whose mischief the Greeks had previously suffered. Oh, of course, weasels and martens could also kill such pests, but they were wild creatures—careless hunters that might also eat the Greeks' chickens at the same time.
We were true Egyptian cats, domesticated animals that could be relied upon (well, theoretically) to kill the rodents bothering humans. The Phoenicians, being excellent traders, convinced the Greeks. They even agreed to pay extra for black cats—because they were the most effective hunters, the traders claimed, as their dark colour made them invisible to their prey! Really? Ha, no! Mice have highly refined senses of smell and hearing, upon which they rely in the dark, thus making a cat's colour completely irrelevant.
The inhabitants of the northern Mediterranean were amateurs in the field of cats back then. But they had experience in another area—and that is where they made their most important contribution to our history. The Greeks were word-smiths. Philosophers. Initially, the Greeks called us "galê", the very same word they used for weasels, because at first, we cats were considered to be in the same category. Ha! But in the fifth century BC, new words developed, and they are still with us. The word "feles" began to be used first, followed by "catta", from which the modern English name for a cat was derived, as well as "gato", "katze", and all other similar-sounding variations in many human languages...
An allegorical tale about "a small nation in Great Europe".
Source: lithub.com