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The Everyday Cat
Cats appear not only in poetry and painting – but also in the most tangible corners of daily life. This gallery presents two utilitarian objects: a clay bread stamp and the upper section of a bronze incense burner. Despite their functional forms, both pieces remind us of how deeply cats were woven into the everyday rituals of past societies – pressed into dough, carried on a breeze of scent.
Cats in the Dough: A Bread Stamp from Egypt
I. 912, Unglazed earthenware with moulded design. Egypt, 8th – 13th century. Radius of 8.1 cm. Museum for Islamic Art, Berlin State Museums
Like the cat itself, bread stamping has a long and layered history. This unglazed ceramic stamp features a plant motif alongside a cat-like figure. A handle is preserved on the reverse. The stamp was likely used to mark bread dough before baking. As the dough rose, the raised pattern would imprint itself into the surface – turning a simple tool into a means of expression, somewhere between decoration and identification: a small homage to the cat, baked into daily life.
Bread stamps could serve multiple functions. In addition to decoration, they could indicate origin or official production – for example, in religious or political contexts. Stamped bread is also known to have played a role in Christian liturgical practices.
Why a cat appears as the motif here remains uncertain. The museum’s collection includes many other bread stamps with geometric, vegetal, and animal designs. Many of these objects were acquired in Egypt in 1905 by Bernhard Moritz, then director of the Khedivial Library in Cairo – today’s Egyptian National Library and Archives.
Scent and Form: The Head of an Incense Burner
I. 1/73, Copper alloy, glass, cast and engraved/ chased. Allegedly from Bujnūrd (Iran), 11th – 12th century. Height 10.5 cm, radius (bottom) 8.1 cm. Museum for Islamic Art, Berlin State Museums
A stylized cat’s head, intricately pierced and richly decorated: this upper part of an incense burner unites form and function. The eyes, once inlaid with turquoise — remnants of which still remain in a hollow — give the object an expressive gaze.
The head was originally part of a complete vessel, inside which fragrant incense was likely burned. Comparable examples of lion-shaped incense burners suggest that the head and back were attached to the body via a hinge mechanism. A significantly smaller lion-shaped fountain figure from eleventh or twelfth-century Egypt in the museum’s collection offers a useful comparison (I. 1959).
The object probably originates from Bojnurd, near the Ālādāgh Mountains in northeastern Iran, a city situated at a historic crossroads of trade and caravan routes close to today’s border with Turkmenistan. During the Seljuk era (11th–12th century), Khorasan was a significant region for the production of such artistically crafted animal-shaped incense burners — especially cats and birds. At its peak, the Seljuk Empire extended from Central Asia across Iraq, Syria, and parts of Anatolia.
This piece was acquired in 1973 by the Museum for Islamic Art through the Frankfurt art and antiques dealer Saeed Motamed. The whereabouts of the remaining parts of the vessel are unknown.
A Note on Provenance
The objects preserved in the Museum for Islamic Art entered the collection through diverse pathways. For instance, they were acquired through excavations, as gifts from external donors or museum staff, traded with other German museum collections, or purchased on the international art market. In terms of the latter acquisition route, the museum often relied on the respective dealer to provide information regarding provenance and provenience, without being able to independently verify this information. Such information was recorded in the museum’s inventory books and is publicly accessible today. In this exhibition, therefore, we have marked data provided by dealers as “allegedly” in order to distinguish it from curatorial and/ or conservation assessments.
Between 1904 and 2014, acquisitions in the Museum for Islamic Art were documented in seven handwritten inventory books. Since 2014, the Berlin State Museums have been using a digital documentation system for inventory processes. However, the handwritten books (also from other collections) have been digitised and are publicly accessible through the link below. The variety of handwriting styles, corrections, annotations, and writing tools present in the volumes demonstrate their nature as continuous working documents throughout the decades.
Back to the cat exhibition overview page
The Cat Exhibition
Cats have a long and complex history of interaction with humans. Bringing together a captivating selection of objects from the collections of the Berlin State Museums, this online exhibition proposes a thematic, experimental lens of inquiry – the figure of the cat.
