The absence of cats, with few exceptions, among the Goa’uld who are still living as Egyptian gods in the Stargate Universe needs to be explained. The result is this parody artifact. The column of hieroglyphs says “A cat eats the evil Go’auld.” The image is based on one of a cat hunting with the family of Nebamun.

Stargate Cat

The Goa’uld are a fictional symbiotic race of ancient astronauts from the American-Canadian military science fiction television franchise Stargate. The Goa’uld are parasites from the planet P3X-888, integrated within a host, most of the time human. The resulting creatures are a powerful race bent on galactic conquest and domination, largely without pity, compassion or remorse. The Goa’uld largely abandoned P3X-888 after deciphering the Stargate, spreading throughout the galaxy and conquering other races. Eventually, the Goa’uld began to die out, until in the eighth or ninth millennium BC Ra discovered Earth and found ancient humans to be much more suitable hosts, due to the ease by which they can be repaired by Goa’uld technology. Ra’s rule over Earth came to an end with a rebellion in the third millennium BC, they had forgotten about Earth until the twentieth century.

They are collectively the greatest extraterrestrial threat to Earth in the first eight seasons of Stargate SG-1 known to the Stargate Command (SGC). They are pejoratively called “snakes” or “snakeheads” by Jack O’Neill. The Goa’uld are the main enemies of SG-1 for most of the series, until they are replaced in this capacity by the Ori in seasons 9 and 10. They also appear in the Stargate Atlantis episode “Critical Mass”, and in the DVD movie Stargate: Continuum.

In the Stargate universe, the word “Goa’uld” means “children of the gods”. I decided to transliterate rather than translate because “children of the gods” doesn’t sound remotely like “Goa’uld” in Egyptian. It was, however, strange to transliterate the word as Ancient Egyptian usually drops the vowels. I decided not to drop them and instead spelled it out completely and added the snake determinative as if it were an adopted word some scribe had to invent.

This piece is painted by hand in acrylic paint and ink on authetic, sustainable Egyptian papyrus. Every attempt has been made to make sure the colors on your screen match the original, but due to variations on computer displays it may appear differently to you.