The Cat Man Panel

About This Experience

The Cat Man is one of the most unusual figures forming part of the Flying Carpet Panel. The name “Cat Man” is entirely modern. We do not know what the people who painted it called the figure—or even whether they regarded it as a person, an animal, a spirit, or something for which our modern categories have no equivalent. It is a pictograph, painted directly onto the sandstone rather than pecked into it, and it stands out even among the other remarkable figures of the Flying Carpet group. What immediately attracts attention is the head. Its shape somehow suggests the face or ears of a feline, which is how the nickname arose. Yet this does not mean that the original artist intended to depict a cat. The resemblance may simply be the result of a highly stylized human or supernatural figure. Perhaps even more fascinating than the head is the body. The torso contains elaborate internal designs rather than being painted as a simple solid human form. This type of interior decoration is one of the characteristics often associated with Barrier Canyon Style rock art, a tradition known for highly stylized anthropomorphic figures, sometimes with unusual proportions, few conventional limbs, and complex patterns inside their bodies. Cat Man, however, does not look like a standard example. There is something individual about it. The unusual head, patterned torso and overall shape distinguish it from many of the more elongated and ghostlike Barrier Canyon figures. Above the head is another curious painted element: a curved form that has sometimes been interpreted as possibly resembling a snake, although it could just as easily be an arc or another geometric symbol. There is no archaeological evidence allowing us to determine its meaning. It would therefore be tempting, but unjustified, to describe Cat Man as a feline deity, a shaman wearing an animal headdress, or a supernatural being associated with a snake. None of these interpretations has been established. The image survives, but its original meaning has been lost. The broader artistic tradition gives us at least some historical context. Barrier Canyon Style is generally associated with ancient hunter-gatherer peoples and is often placed broadly within the Late Archaic period, approximately 2000 BCE to 500 CE, although dating individual pictographs is extremely difficult and some examples may be older. For that reason, Cat Man cannot be assigned a precise age. We can only say that it appears to belong to a very old artistic tradition that may reach back several thousand years. Somewhere within that distant period, someone stood before this rock wall, prepared pigment and deliberately created this strange anthropomorphic figure as part of what we now call the Flying Carpet Panel. We do not know who that painter was. We do not know why the torso was filled with such elaborate designs. We do not know whether the unusual head represented an animal, a mask, a headdress, a supernatural being or simply a stylized human face. And we do not know whether the curved element above it was a snake, a symbol, or something whose meaning has disappeared completely. Perhaps that is what makes the Cat Man so compelling. Thousands of years may separate us from the person who created it, yet the image still succeeds in doing something very human: it makes us stop, look closely and wonder. The nickname tells us what we think we see. The painting itself belongs to someone else’s world—and that world left us the image, but not the explanation.