Showing cats was all the rage in the late Victorian era. One of the unusual breeds exhibited at the Crystal Palace Cat Show in 1871 was an Abyssinian—“captured in the late Abyssinian War”—who took third place. The report on the cat show, published in the January 27, 1872, issue of Harper’s Weekly, was the first known mention in print of the breed. Unfortunately, no records exist regarding the cats’ origins, although myths and speculation abound, including claims that it was the cat of the pharaohs, and that it was created in Britain by crossing silver and brown tabbies with cats that had “ticked” coats.

Today, genetic evidence suggests that the cats came from Indian Ocean coastal regions and parts of Southeast Asia. British and Dutch traders may well have brought the cats from ports such as Calcutta, India, or the islands of Indonesia. A taxidermied specimen of a ruddy ticked cat exhibited in the 1830s at the Leiden Zoological Museum in The Netherlands, where he was labeled “Patrie, domestica India,” gives creedence to that theory. The cats were probably given the name Abyssinian because Zula, the cat exhibited at the Crystal Palace, was said to have been imported from Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Early pedigrees show crosses to nonAbyssinian cats, which may explain the introduction of new coat colors and the gene for long hair.

Enter the Somali. This longhaired variety of the Abyssinian was first noted in the early 20th century and probably came about when breeders introduced longhaired cats into their breeding programs to augment their stock—especially after World War II, when Abys were few and far between—but they weren’t developed as a breed in their own right until the 1960s and 1970s. They were given the name Somali as a nod to that country’s geographic status as the next door neighbor to Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia).