The Cats on the Wall: Lions and house cats in Egyptian art, the family tree of the cats, and how much time the Flood story leaves to make them all from one pair

Roger Hopkins

doi:10.67690/1r3hwn52

The Cats on the Wall

Lions and house cats in Egyptian art, the family tree of the cats, and how much time the Flood story leaves to make them all from one pair

Authors

R. Hopkins

Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.67690/1r3hwn52

Abstract

I have cut and set stone for more than fifty years, and that trade has taken me more than once into the tombs of Egypt. This time it is not the painted people I want to talk about but the painted animals, and one animal in particular, the cat. On the walls of the Valley of the Kings the king spears lions, and in the marsh scenes a small house cat crouches under a chair or climbs the reeds after birds. The Egyptians painted lions and leopards and cheetahs and small house cats, big cats and little cats, as clearly separate animals, and they did it from the very dawn of their art, close to the time the Flood story places Noah stepping off the Ark. In this paper I set that record beside two other things. The first is what the biologists who study cats have found: that the roughly forty living species of cat belong to eight lineages that trace back through more than ten million years, and that the specialists will not even call two cats separate species unless their family lines parted at least eight hundred thousand years ago. The second is the young earth chronology, in which a single pair of cats leaves the Ark only a few centuries before these paintings and must give rise to every major cat on earth, from the tiger to the sand cat. Laying the art beside the biology beside the calendar, and putting a clock on the job, I argue that the timing does not hold. I take the best objection seriously, as long as an explanation can be given and is backed up with evidence.

Author Biography

R. Hopkins

Roger Hopkins is a world famous stone mason, best known for his television appearances on History channel and PBS shows like This Old House and the NOVA "Secrets of Lost Empires" series and educated in Geosciences from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

References

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Published

2026-08-25

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026): Truth in Research: Foundations of Scientific Inquiry

Section

Articles

The Cats on the Wall

Lions and house cats in Egyptian art, the family tree of the cats, and how much time the Flood story leaves to make them all from one pair

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