The Sumerian Tablet That Says Cats Were Brought to Earth — And Describes Their Original Purpose

The Sumerian Tablet That Says Cats Were Brought to Earth — And Describes Their Original Purpose

In the year 1927, deep beneath the ruins of ancient Nippur, a small clay tablet was pulled from a sealed pottery jar that had not been opened in over 4,000 years. The tablet was no larger than a man’s palm. The cuneiform pressed into its surface was unusually fine, almost reverent in its precision, as though the scribe who carved it had understood that what he was recording could never be repeated. When the tablet reached the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the autumn of that same year, the assistant cataloger, who first attempted a translation, set the piece aside within 40 minutes and recorded only a single line in the accession ledger. The line read: “Content of religious or mythological nature, defer to senior staff.” The tablet was given the catalog number N2847 and placed in a wooden drawer in the basement archive, where it remained untranslated and unread for the next 44 years.

What that tablet describes in language so clear and so direct that the scholar who eventually broke its silence in 1971 refused for several months to publish her findings is the arrival on Earth of a small, four-legged creature brought down out of the sky by the gods of the Anunnaki for a purpose that the tablet calls the watching, the guarding, and the keeping of the thin places. The creature the tablet describes is the cat. And what the tablet says the cat was sent here to do is not what any of us have been told.

The story of how this tablet was rediscovered begins with a woman named Eleanor Ashworth, a junior philologist working out of Oxford on a six-month exchange visit to the Penn Museum in the spring of 1971. Ashworth had been given the unenviable task of cataloging what the museum staff called the “residue drawer,” a collection of roughly 200 minor tablets, fragments, and seal impressions that had been pulled from the Nippur expeditions of the 1920s and had never been formally examined. Most of the residue was administrative: inventories of grain, receipts for sheep, the kind of bureaucratic recordkeeping that fills the corners of every Mesopotamian dig site. But on the third week of her assignment, Ashworth pulled drawer 14, removed a small bundle wrapped in oiled cotton, and unwrapped tablet N2847. She would later write in a private letter to a colleague at Cambridge that she knew within the first six lines that what she was holding did not belong to the residue at all. It belonged somewhere else—somewhere the museum did not yet have a category for.

The tablet is dated by paleographic analysis to the late third millennium before the common era, almost certainly to the reign of the last kings of the third dynasty of Ur. The scribe identifies himself in the opening lines by a name that translates roughly as Enmatar, son of K-Ningal, a temple official attached to the E-kur, the great house of the god Enlil. The opening passage is formal. It invokes the names of the high gods, asks for the favor of the scribe of heaven, and declares that what follows is a true accounting of an old matter given to the scribe by his father, who received it from his father, going back, the tablet says, “to the days when the gods still walked among men, and the doors of the upper places had not yet been sealed.”

This phrase, “the doors of the upper places,” appears several times in the tablet, and Ashworth would spend nearly a year trying to determine what it referred to. Her eventual conclusion was that it referred to specific physical locations on the Earth where, in the belief system of the Sumerians, the boundary between the visible world and another world ran particularly thin. We will return to that detail because it matters more than it sounds.

What the tablet describes next is the arrival. The Anunnaki, the tablet says, came down from their dwelling places in the higher sky to inspect the early settlements of men, and they found among the dwellings of men a great unhappiness. The men were sick in their sleep. Their thoughts were crowded with shapes that did not belong to them. Their children were waking in the night, pointing at the corners of their houses where nothing visible stood, and weeping until the dawn. The elders of the settlements went to the priests, and the priests went to the offering stones, and the offering stones carried the message upward to the gods.

And the gods, the tablet says, recognized the cause of the sickness immediately because the cause of the sickness was not new to them. The cause of the sickness, the tablet states with no hesitation, was that things from the other side of the thin places were entering the dwellings of men while men slept and feeding on what the tablet calls the “inner light.” The Anunnaki conferred among themselves, and one of them, named in the tablet as Ninkarag, the Lady of the Foothills, proposed a solution. The solution was to bring down from a world that the tablet does not name, but only refers to as “the green star of the seventh house,” a small creature that already existed there for the same purpose—a creature that, in the language of the tablet, was a watcher of the thin places.

A creature whose eyes could see what human eyes could not see. Whose body, though small, carried within it an energetic signature that the visitors from the other side of the thin places could not approach. The tablet describes the creature in a passage that takes up nearly a third of the entire surface, and the description is unmistakable: four legs, a tail held in many positions, eyes that take in light and return it so that they shine in the dark, soft pads on the feet that make no sound on the floor, a coat of fur that, when stroked against its natural direction, releases a small spark, as though the creature carried within itself the residue of the lightning.

The tablet says, “The creature sleeps for two-thirds of the day, but its sleep is not the sleep of men. Its sleep is, in the words of the scribe, a watching that wears the appearance of resting.” And the tablet says that when the creature is fully awake, when it rises and turns its head and fixes its gaze on a corner of a room where no person stands, it is at that moment doing the work for which it was brought down to Earth. The tablet calls this creature in Sumerian the mushdub, which Ashworth translated with considerable hesitation as “the holder of the door.” She hesitated because the standard Sumerian word for a domestic cat in surviving texts is sua—sometimes rendered as zau—and the term mushdub does not appear in any other surviving tablet from any other site. It is a term used only once, only here, only on N2847.

Ashworth’s interpretation, defended in her unpublished monograph of 1973, is that mushdub was not the common word for cat, but a ceremonial or priestly word used only when speaking of the cat in its original capacity as a guardian of the thin places. In ordinary speech, the cat was sua. In the language of the temple, when the priests were referring to what the cat had been sent here to do, the cat was mushdub: the one who keeps the door from opening.

The next passage of the tablet describes the deployment of these creatures across the early human settlements. The Anunnaki, the tablet says, brought down many of them—in numbers the tablet records as “more than the leaves of a single olive tree.” And the creatures were placed first in the temples, then in the houses of the priests, then in the houses of the kings, and finally in the dwellings of ordinary men. The tablet is specific about the order: the temples first because the temples, according to the worldview of the tablet, were built on the thin places; they were, in fact, deliberately constructed on top of them in order to mark their locations and to manage what passed through them. The cats were placed in the temples to do what the priests, with all their ceremonies and all their offerings, could not do alone: to stand at the door, to watch what tried to come through, and to send it back.

There is a passage in the tablet that has caused more difficulty for translators than any other. It describes what happens, according to the scribe, when a cat sees something that should not be there. The cat, the tablet says, becomes wide; its hair stands; its tail thickens; its body turns sideways to the thing it sees, so that it appears larger than it is. Its eyes do not blink, and in its throat there forms a sound that the tablet describes as “the sound of stones rolling against each other under deep water.” This sound, the tablet says, is not anger. It is the sound by which the cat closes the door.

Anyone who has ever owned a cat and watched it stare at an empty corner with its hair raised, its tail thickened, and a low, rolling growl in its throat has seen, the tablet would tell us, exactly what the scribe described 4,000 years ago. We have been taught to call this behavior a quirk, a trick of feline instinct, a response to something in the air, a draft, a smell, or a sound we cannot hear. The tablet says it is none of those things. The tablet says it is the work.

Ashworth’s translation, when she finally completed it in the spring of 1973, ran to 41 pages. She submitted it to three journals. All three rejected it. One returned the manuscript with a letter stating that the subject matter was unsuitable for serious philological publication. Another sent it out for peer review and reported back that the reviewers had been unable to agree on whether the translation was a serious scholarly work or an elaborate fabrication. The third kept the manuscript for nine months and then returned it without comment.

Ashworth eventually circulated the translation privately in mimeographed copies to a small group of colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden, and Chicago. The copies were passed from hand to hand, photocopied, recopied, and over the course of the next 20 years entered the underground literature of fringe Mesopotamian studies, where they remain to this day. Tablet N2847 itself was, in 1981, quietly transferred from the open archive of the Penn Museum to a restricted storage facility in the museum’s lower basement, where access requires written approval from the curator of the Near Eastern collection. Requests for access in the past 40 years have, according to several researchers who have tried, almost always been denied.

The question that confronts anyone who reads Ashworth’s translation in full is the question of the original purpose. The tablet does not merely say that cats were brought down to watch the thin places; it describes in considerable detail what the thin places are, why they require watching, and what would happen if they were left unwatched. The thin places, according to the tablet, are openings in the fabric of the world. They are not metaphors; they are physical locations. Although the “physical” they refer to is a physical the tablet does not assume we share. The tablet says that the world we walk through is the surface of something deeper and that, at certain points along this surface, the deeper layers come close enough to be reached. Sometimes the layers can be reached from our side by men who know what they are doing. More often, the tablet warns, the layers reach us from their side by things that know what they are doing, but whose intentions are not the intentions of the men they reach.

The tablet does not call these things demons. The tablet calls them in a phrase that Ashworth translated as “the unhoused”—the ones who have no body of their own. They move from thin place to thin place, the tablet says, looking for openings into the dwellings of men, because the inner light of men is the food they require. The cat, in the tablet’s worldview, is the only physical animal whose energetic signature is incompatible with the presence of the unhoused. The tablet does not explain why. It says only that this is the nature of the creature, that this is why the creature exists, and that on the green star of the seventh house, the creature performed the same function and was already known there for what it was.

When the Anunnaki brought the creatures down to Earth, they did not invent a new role for them. They imported a service that already existed and placed that service into the human dwellings that needed it. The tablet states, in a passage of striking matter-of-factness, that without the cats, the early settlements would not have survived, that the sickness in the children, the crowding in the thoughts, the weeping in the night—all of it—would have intensified until the settlements emptied and the experiment of human civilization in the lower world would have ended within a few generations. The cat, in other words, is not a pet. The cat, in the tablet’s reckoning, is a piece of infrastructure. It is the reason we are here.

What the tablet does next is the part that, when Ashworth first read it, caused her to set the tablet down and walk out of the museum reading room for almost an hour before returning. The tablet describes the original purpose of the cat in a sequence of seven specific functions.

The first function is the guarding of the sleeping. When a person sleeps, the tablet says, the inner light becomes loose in the body, no longer fully anchored. And it is in this state that the unhoused can most easily reach it. The cat, by placing itself near the sleeper, by curling against the body or sitting at the foot of the bed, anchors the inner light back into the body and prevents it from being drawn out. Anyone who has slept with a cat on the bed has felt, the tablet would tell us, exactly what it describes: the unusual depth of the sleep, the absence of certain kinds of dreams, the morning sensation of having been somewhere safer than one would otherwise have been.

The second function is the watching of the doorway. Every dwelling has a doorway, and every doorway, in the tablet’s understanding, is a small, thin place, because doorways are points of transition, and the unhoused are drawn to points of transition. The cat sits at the doorway, sometimes for hours, watching what enters and what leaves. The tablet says that the cat does not watch the door for the sake of curiosity. The cat watches the door because something has to.

The third function is the testing of new things. When a strange object is brought into a dwelling, when a new person enters, when a gift is given, the cat investigates; it approaches; it sniffs; it places its paw. The tablet says that this is not behavior of curiosity, but of inspection. The cat is determining whether what has entered the dwelling carries with it any contamination from the other side. If the cat accepts the object, the tablet says the object is safe. If the cat refuses it, if the cat hisses at it, if the cat avoids the room in which it is placed, the tablet says the object should be removed.

The fourth function is the marking of territory. The cat moves through the dwelling, the tablet says, rubbing its face against the corners, the door frames, the legs of the furniture, depositing on each surface a small portion of its own signature. This signature, the tablet says, is what makes the dwelling uninhabitable to the unhoused. A house that has been marked by a cat for a sufficient length of time becomes, in the tablet’s language, sealed against the lower entries. A house without a cat is, by default, unsealed.

The fifth function is the breaking of silences. The tablet says that the unhoused are most active in silence, that they enter dwellings most easily when the dwellings are quiet, and that the cat, with its occasional sudden movements, its leaping at nothing, its racing through the house at night for reasons that seem to belong to no one, is, in fact, disrupting the silence in the precise moments when the silence has become a doorway. The cat does not run through the house at night because the cat is foolish. The cat runs through the house at night because something has tried to come through and the cat has chased it back.

The sixth function is the holding of the gaze. The tablet describes, in a passage that Ashworth later said she found the most disturbing of all, the practice by which the cat will fix its eyes on a specific location in a room, sometimes for a great length of time, and refuse to look away. The location, the tablet says, is always the place where something is currently trying to enter. The cat holds the gaze because the gaze itself is the barrier. So long as the cat is looking, the entry cannot complete. The cat sees it, the cat holds it, and by holding it, the cat prevents it.

The seventh function, the tablet says, is the one that cannot be explained in human language because it requires concepts the scribe says his own teachers were never able to fully transmit. It is described only as “the giving of the throat sound,” the deep, slow, rolling vibration that cats produce when they are content. The purr. The tablet says the purr is not a sound of pleasure. The tablet says the purr is a frequency deliberately set by the design of the creature that closes whatever portion of the thin place remains open after the other six functions have been performed. The purr, in the tablet’s understanding, is the final seal. It is what the cat does when its work is complete.

The tablet then turns, near its end, to the question of what would happen if the cats were no longer here. The scribe writes that this question was put to the priests of the E-kur many times, and the priests always gave the same answer. If the cats withdrew, the priests said, the thin places would reopen one by one. The unhoused would return to the dwellings of men. The children would once again wake in the night and point at the corners, and within the span of three generations, the civilization that had been built upon the assumption of protection would begin quietly, and without obvious cause, to come apart.

The scribe writes this in the calm voice that Sumerian scribes used for all serious matters. There is no alarm in his sentences. There is only the recording of what he was told by men whose business it was to know. The tablet then ends with a final passage, partially damaged but still mostly legible, in which the scribe addresses the future reader directly. He says that the writing of this tablet has been done because the knowledge it contains is in danger of being lost. He says that, already in his own time, the temple officials have begun to treat the cats as ordinary animals: to feed them carelessly, to drive them out of certain shrines, to forget the prayers that were once said at their birth and at their death.

He says that the priests of the next generation may not even understand what they have lost. He says that the cats themselves will continue to do the work because the work is in their nature and cannot be removed from them by the forgetfulness of men. But he warns that the men who do not honor the cats, who do not understand the cats, who treat them as nothing more than household animals to be tolerated or discarded, will be men whose houses are no longer fully sealed. He says in the final line of the tablet that the cats remember what we have forgotten, and that this is why they look at us the way they do.

This is the part of the tablet that is most difficult to read without feeling that one is being addressed across an enormous distance of time. The scribe could not have known 4,000 years ago that his words would survive in a single sealed jar, that they would be unearthed in 1927 by a team of American archaeologists, that they would lie unread for 44 years, that they would be translated by a young woman from Oxford who would then spend the rest of her career unable to convince any major institution to take her work seriously. He could not have known any of that. And yet, his final sentence reads as though it were written for exactly that situation: “The cats remember what we have forgotten, and this is why they look at us the way they do.”

The Egyptian connection, when it appears in the secondary literature, is impossible to ignore. The Egyptians, who followed the Sumerians by roughly a thousand years, treated the cat with a reverence that no other ancient civilization has matched. The goddess Bastet, with her cat’s head and her woman’s body, was the protector of the household, the guardian of children, the keeper of the home against the entry of evil. The Egyptians mummified their cats. They buried them in dedicated necropolises. They mourned the death of a household cat by shaving their eyebrows—the same gesture of grief reserved for human family members. The penalty in dynastic Egypt for killing a cat, even by accident, was death.

None of this makes sense if the cat was merely a useful animal that controlled vermin. It makes complete sense if the Egyptians had inherited from the Sumerians, who came before them, the understanding that the cat was something more than an animal, that the cat was a guardian whose original purpose was to keep the unhoused outside the doors of human dwellings. The Egyptians did not invent the reverence of the cat. They received it. And in receiving it, they preserved in their funeral rites and their temple practices the last large-scale memory of what the cat had been sent here to do.

By the time Greek and Roman civilizations rose, the memory had already begun to fade. The Romans kept cats, but did not revere them. By the early medieval period in Europe, the cat had been recategorized by religious authorities as an animal associated with witchcraft and malevolent forces. The very behaviors the Sumerian tablet describes as the cat’s guarding functions—the staring at nothing, the night running, the watching of doorways—were reinterpreted as evidence that the cat was in league with the very things it had been sent to guard against.

The medieval European population began, under official encouragement, to kill cats in large numbers. The Sumerian tablet, if it is to be believed, would suggest that the centuries during which Europeans killed their guardians were the centuries during which the dwellings of Europe were left unsealed, and that the cats, when they began to return in the slow centuries after the witch hunts faded, returned to do the same work they had always done in dwellings that no longer remembered they had needed it.

What Ashworth’s translation forces us to confront, if we accept it, even provisionally, is the possibility that everything we believe about the relationship between humans and cats is upside down. We do not own cats; the tablet would say cats were placed among us. We did not domesticate them; the tablet would say they accepted a posting. We do not provide them with shelter and food in exchange for their companionship; the tablet would say we provide them with shelter and food in exchange for their continued willingness to do work that, without them, no one in our species is capable of doing.

The cat that sits on the windowsill staring at nothing is not staring at nothing. The cat that races through the hallway at 3:00 in the morning is not racing for no reason. The cat that purrs against your chest while you fall asleep is not purring out of contentment alone. The tablet would say that every one of these behaviors is the same set of seven functions that the scribe of Nippur recorded 4,000 years ago, performed by creatures whose original purpose has been preserved entirely within them, even as the human civilization that once understood that purpose has forgotten almost everything about it.

The tablet survives. It sits in a restricted drawer in a museum basement in Philadelphia, and access to it is, by all available accounts, almost impossible to obtain. Ashworth died in 2007 without ever having seen her translation published by a major academic press. The mimeographed copies of her work continue to circulate, and the cats continue in every house, in every apartment, in every alley, in every barn where they have made their dwellings to do what the tablet says they were brought here to do.

They sit at the doors. They watch the corners. They run through the silence. They hold the gaze. And in their throats, when the work is done, they make the sound that the scribe of Nippur recorded 4,000 years ago as the final seal. Whatever you believe about the tablet, whatever you believe about the Anunnaki, whatever you believe about the green star of the seventh house, there is one observation that requires no belief at all. If you live with a cat, watch it tonight. Watch where it goes when the lights are turned off. Watch where it sits when the house is quiet. Watch what it stares at when there is nothing there to stare at. And ask yourself, honestly, whether what you are watching is an ordinary animal performing ordinary behaviors, or whether you are watching something that arrived here a very long time ago for a very specific purpose that it has never stopped performing and that the rest of us have only just begun to remember.

The tablet is real. The translation is real. The scribe of Nippur recorded what he was told in the calm voice of a man whose only obligation was to the truth. And the cats, in their silent and continuous work, have never once let him down.