Graves of nearly 600 cats and dogs in ancient Egypt may be world’s oldest pet cemetery

Tue. Mar. 2, 2021

Archaeozoologist Marta Osypinska and her colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered a graveyard full of cat and dog remains just outside the city walls of the Roman port of Berenice, beneath a Roman trash dump, in 2011.

“I’ve never encountered a cemetery like this,” says Michael MacKinnon, who has studied the role of animals across the bygone Mediterranean but was not involved with the new work. “The idea of pets as part of the family is hard to get at in antiquity, but I think they were [family] here.”

Read the full article in Science magazine to learn more about this fascinating site!