Egypt

Mau just means cat; the breed is a 1950s project built on Egyptian imports.

The modern breed traces to cats taken out of Egypt in the 1950s by an exiled Russian princess and bred first in Italy, then in the United States. Spotted cats appear in Egyptian tomb painting, but no continuous line from antiquity to the show bench has ever been demonstrated.

The name preserves a five-hundred-year-old mistake about where Romani people came from.

When Romani groups reached western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were taken for Egyptians, partly because some carried letters of safe conduct describing a pilgrimage from Little Egypt. English clipped Egyptian to Gypcian and then Gypsy; Spanish gitano, French gitan and Greek gyftos come from the same error. Scholars showed in the eighteenth century that Romani is an Indo-Aryan language from northern India. It is treated as a slur today because it is a name imposed by outsiders on a false premise and carries centuries of stereotype with it, as in the verb gyp, meaning to cheat; in Britain and Ireland, however, the official category Gypsy, Roma and Traveller is still in use and some Romani people there apply the word to themselves.

The pose copies a drawing convention: Egyptian artists showed head and legs in profile but the shoulders square to the viewer.

The phrase is older than the song that made it famous. It appears in the 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird, where Jem explains that he is walking like an Egyptian because his class has been studying them, and it turns up in American newspapers by 1978. Liam Sternberg wrote the 1986 Bangles hit after watching passengers on a rough Channel ferry stick their arms out for balance.