The cheetah, the fastest of land animals, was known and prized in the ancient Near East and Egypt, where its speed and its tractability made it a companion of royalty, kept and shown as a mark of status. In Egypt the swift and dangerous felines were associated with the goddess Mafdet, one of the oldest of the Egyptian deities, a feline protector who defended the sun-god and the king against snakes and scorpions, speed and sharp claws turned to guardianship. The cheetah's distinctive tear-marked face and its unmatched swiftness set it apart from the heavier lions and leopards of royal iconography.
The cheetah's real situation today stands in stark contrast to its old status as a favoured royal companion: the species is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, its population reduced to a small fraction of historic numbers and its range collapsed to scattered populations in southern and eastern Africa, with the Asiatic cheetah, once found from Arabia to India, now reduced to a critically endangered handful of individuals surviving only in Iran, the last wild population of the subspecies anywhere. Historical accounts often blur the cheetah with the leopard, calling it a hunting leopard despite the two belonging to entirely different genera, Acinonyx and Panthera, a confusion that persisted well into the modern era even as Egyptian and later Persian courts prized the cheetah specifically for a speed no true leopard can match.