Mediterranean connected
The Kamiros cat amulet is a find from the archaic Greek period; The British Museum file indicates that it was probably made in Egypt.2
Separating the place of manufacture from the place of discovery allows us to read a Mediterranean connection without assigning to the object a history that its record does not document.2
Artifacts from Kamiros and Naukratis
The British Museum cat and bird figure is described as being of Hellenistic Greek manufacture, while its Naukratis context remains uncertain.3
Kamiros names the discovery of the amulet; Naukratis appears as an uncertain context for the Hellenistic figure. These references are not interchangeable values.23
Evidence of dispersion
The 2025 genomic study places the arrival in Europe of the ancestry of modern domestic cats approximately two millennia ago, probably from North Africa.1
The material evidence of the two objects can document pieces, attributions and circulation; it is not a genomic test of feline populations or their ancestry.231
Uncertainty and trade
The genomic review questions whether a Neolithic dispersal alone explains the modern ancestry arriving in Europe and leaves open questions about source populations and routes.1
This evidence does not allow us to conclude that there were domestic cats in all of Greece nor to reconstruct each Mediterranean exchange on its own.231