Research

Every episode is researched before a word is written. These are the companion notes: what the sources actually say, where scholars genuinely disagree, and the claims we caught and corrected in our own scripts before recording.

Episode 1
Anubis: the god who was demoted

He was the sole lord of the dead, and then Osiris took the title. On the black that is not fur, the jackal that may not be a jackal, and a parentage that changes by era.

Episode 2
Osiris: the murder Egypt refused to write down

Egypt never wrote the story out in full. The version everyone knows comes from a Greek writer roughly 2,400 years later, and scholars question how Egyptian it really is.

Episode 3
The Weighing of the Heart: the mistake we caught in our own script

The forty-two assessors are not in the painting everyone pictures. Our first script put them there, over a plate where you can count the figures on screen.

Episode 4
Sekhmet: the goddess the myth never names

The peer-reviewed entry devoted to this myth never names her once. It calls her Hathor. We verified that by scanning the full text, and it caught us overstating.

Episode 5
How many Egyptian gods? The count our own script got wrong

Our draft said Egypt had no group of twelve. A peer-reviewed entry refuted it: twelve primordial gods stand on a wall at Karnak. Just not the twelve you were handed.

Episode 6
Horus: the question Egypt never closed

Son of Osiris, or brother of Osiris? Egypt wrote down both and the standard reference refuses to pick. He is also not the god of war, and that mistake has a named cause.

Episode 7
Ra: the god Egypt would not give a face

Seventy-five names on one tomb wall, a holy city the earliest evidence gives to another god, and a sun drawn as a wrapped corpse. Also the correction almost every retelling needs: it is Hathor he sends, not Sekhmet.

Episode 8
Seth: the villain Egypt trusted with the sun

Egypt's god of chaos spent every night in the bow of the sun boat, fighting the serpent. He was not the villain until about two thousand years after he was the hero.

Notes are published once their episode is public, so nothing here spoils an unreleased film. If you find an error, leave a comment on the episode it concerns; substantiated corrections are pinned there and fixed here.