Deftly climbing ever higher, using cracks in the sloped façade to find my grip and hoist myself up, I slowly scale the monument cased in limestone. A glint of gold catches my eye as I look up and reach the apex. I’m standing on top of one of the great pyramids of Giza. My view stretches in all directions, showing a landscape of desert, pyramids, temple ruins, and the waters of the Nile. After “synchronizing” with the landscape, I slide down the pyramid as though it’s a ski slope. This is but one of the many wonders a player can experience in the Ubisoft video game Assassin’s Creed: Origins. But beyond visual wonder and gameplay, is the video game historically accurate, and what does it say about ancient Egypt? Let’s dive in.
Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Full disclosure: I absolutely love the video game series Assassin’s Creed. A millennia-old struggle between the Assassin Brotherhood and the Templars, set in different historical periods? Hell yeah. But as a specialist in ancient Egyptian art and archaeology, I wanted to analyze the game from a historical perspective. And I’m here to report that I’m happy with what I found.
Set in Ptolemaic Egypt, Assassin’s Creed: Origins is impressively accurate. The game focuses on authenticity in terms of physical setting, time period, and culture. Driven by a dynamic narrative of intrigue, Origins transports players to antiquity and allows us to roleplay as an Egyptian. Yet at the same time, we’re able to discover ancient Egypt as a 21st-century Western gamer. Finally, Origins delivers that air of romanticism we so commonly associate with Egypt. It’s a place of wisdom and mystery, where hidden treasures and secrets are waiting to be discovered.
I do, however, have one major gripe with the game. Origins portrays Cleopatra VII as a manipulative seductress, stripping her of the complexity and badassery she had in real life. Cleo has been getting a bad rep since the beginning of the Roman Empire. Instead of dispelling those myths, Assassin’s Creed: Origins fuels the ancient propaganda.
Before I get into the nitty-gritty of Origins’ historical accuracy, I’d like to give you background on the series and game, so we’re all on the same page.
Origins Background Info
*Spoilers ahead.
Ubisoft released Origins in 2017 as the 10th installment in the Assassin’s Creed video game series. Popular for its action-adventure stealth and combat gameplay, Assassin’s Creed takes place in various historical time periods. Games in the series range from the Crusades to the Italian Renaissance to Colonial America. The series centers on the Order of the Assassins, or the Brotherhood (the good guys), fighting for peace through liberty and free will. Their enemies are the Order of the Knights Templar (the bad guys), who seek peace through forced order and control.
Fictional Story Set in Historic Events
Origins explores the beginning of this millennia-long conflict with the story of Bayek, a medjay sworn to protect the Pharaoh and the people of Egypt. When Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII visits the Siwa Oasis in 49 BCE, masked royal advisors kill Bayek’s son in a struggle. This action sets the medjay on a quest for revenge.
Bayek’s personal mission becomes entangled within a grander historical narrative of mystery and power. Those responsible for his son’s death are members of the Order of the Ancients. As precursors of the Templars, they seek to control the ancient world. Bayek and his wife, Aya, team up with Cleopatra VII, who was forced off her throne by the Order in favor of her puppet brother, Ptolemy XIII. Together, they take down key members of the Order, ally with Rome via Julius Caesar, and restore Cleo to the throne.
Once in power, however, Cleo and Caesar do a major 180 and join the Order of the Ancients. As a result, Bayek and Aya create the Hidden Ones, precursor to the Assassin Brotherhood. Swearing to protect the people from those who seek to control them, Aya ends the game by teaming up with Brutus and Cassius to assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BCE.
Historical Accuracy in a Fictional Story
It’s important to note that the story in Origins is fictitious. It uses real events and figures from history but takes a lot of liberties to fit in the Assassin’s Creed lore. Since there are a lot of embellishments, I’m not going to comment too much on the story itself. The broad strokes, however, are true.
Cleopatra VII did wrestle her brother for the throne. She also teamed up with Julius Caesar to become the ruler of Egypt. Brutus and Cassius killed Caesar in the Roman Senate, but Aya certainly wasn’t there (because she’s not real). Caesar’s death wasn’t the result of joining an ancient order; it was because he amassed so much power that he was threatening the Roman Republic.
Going through the entire narrative piece by piece will take forever. So, let’s instead focus on other aspects of the video game to determine if it’s historically accurate.
Cleopatra VII in Assassin’s Creed: Origins
Storytelling and character development drive the game by drawing us into a narrative of epic proportions where Bayek rubs shoulders with the greats of history. Game reviewer Alanah Pearce notes that “you’re strung through a twisted story of pharaohs and corrupt leaders, of love gained and lost, and the plights of the lower class […]”1. The pharaohs and leaders Pearce refers to—Cleopatra VII and Julius Caesar—are perhaps two of the most infamous and dramatic figures in history.
It’s disappointing, however, that Origins’ creators decided to capitalize on Cleo’s infamy. The game perpetuates colonialist and misogynist myths that paint the last queen of Egypt as a manipulative Eastern seductress. She’s the ultimate femme fatale.
An example of this is when Bayek first meets Cleopatra in a cutscene. She’s in hiding with her entourage, who are prone to “excess.” They’re dancing seductively in the evening glow while Cleo lounges on a couch. She’s flirting with a young man who’s clearly fawning over her. She abruptly stands and, with arms waving, shouts, “I will sleep with anyone! As long as they agree to be executed in the morning.” Damn girl. Chill.
This quote references a myth perpetuated by ancient Roman male authors who slandered the shit out of Cleo because she was the enemy.2 It’s not even ten seconds into her introduction, and she’s portrayed as a highly sexualized and dangerous woman. A crazy slut, if you will.
Furthermore, viewers can’t help but feast their eyes on her beautiful face framed by an Egyptian-style wig. Not to mention her scantily clad, sensuous body with ample cleavage.
Cleo and Mummies as Sexual Objects
Cleo is a commodity, much like the female mummies who were treated as sexual objects in Victorian England. During this period, archaeologists excavated ancient Egyptian sites and obsessed over lady mummies.3 I know it’s gross, but it’s true. There was even a popular literary genre that I like to call mummy erotica. It featured resurrected female mummies, who were exotic, sexy, and dangerous objects enticing Victorian men.
In Origins, the eroticism of Eastern women appears in another strange way. The title screen’s image is a beautiful woman inspired by the gorgeous Nefertiti bust. But she has a decaying face, body wrapped in linen, and glowing eyes. She’s giving sexy mummy vibes. This mummy has no role in the game and seems to be just visual candy for us to enjoy. I find it weird that even though she’s obviously dead, the artists still decided to make her totally hot.
Cleo is Done Dirty
As a major character in the narrative, Cleo continues to get short shrift. Once she’s back on the throne, the Order of the Ancients (the bad guys) persuade her to join them. As a result, Egypt falls into corruption and ruin, thereby showing Cleo’s ineptitude as a ruler.
Bayek and Aya are angry that she used them for her own gains and betrayed not only them but the people of Egypt. They claim she was poisoned by Rome. I find this accusation interesting since, in history, ancient Roman writers stated that Cleopatra was the one who “poisoned” Roman men, namely Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. In a final confrontation, Aya tells Cleo that she’s a “dead tyrant’s whore,” and a “Queen of liars and snakes.” Tell us how you really feel, Aya.
Cleopatra’s legacy as a cruel seductress is so ingrained in popular culture that the creators of Origins just couldn’t let her be a heroine. Instead, they listened to ancient Roman authors who slandered her for centuries. I believe that Ubisoft missed a great opportunity to show a more nuanced and complicated figure in history. What we end up with is a queen relegated to hot villain status.
Diversity in Ptolemaic Egypt
Although Egyptian pharaohs and Roman rulers occupy a central place in Origin’s main narrative, several side quests and stories reveal the lives of everyday Egyptians. As a common villager, Bayek provides that daily life perspective. He’s able to freely interact with people from all walks of life in ancient Egypt, most of whom are usually absent in stories of grandeur.
Through Bayek’s eyes, Origins refreshingly portrays the incredible diversity of Ptolemaic Egypt. Characters speak many languages, worship different religions and gods, and live in diverse environments.
Furthermore, the game answers the question, “What race were the ancient Egyptians?” by representing a variety of physical characteristics and skin color. True to this period of history, ancient Egyptians in Origins come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. They range from warm brown skin tones like modern North Africans, to “black” from Sub-Saharan Africa, to “white” from Greece and Rome. Others are more of an ambiguous mix, clearly reflecting the multi-cultural society of Egypt under Ptolemaic rule.
The Open World of Assassin’s Creed: Origins
As an open-world video game, Origins takes full advantage of the setting to create a historically accurate and visually stunning world. There are, however, some conscious modifications.
Developers took four years to create the game, with 1,000 people working on the project. 200–300 of them were artists and designers who consulted with historians, archaeologists, and Egyptologists, notably Jean-Claude Golvin. They used architecture, art, archaeology reports, monographs, photographs, and archival sources to create an authentic open world. Origins accurately depicts various Egyptian environments such as deserts, the Nile, oases, cities, villages, stone circles, and farmland.4
Built Environment
From Giza and the Fayum to Memphis and Alexandria, Origins’ cities contain historically accurate architecture and art. Sometimes, the cities even replicate existing buildings and known works of art. For example, Alexandria is an astounding Hellenistic metropolis with Greek statues, columns, and meander designs. There are also temples with pediments and acroteria, a tholos temple, an outdoor theater, the great library, and obelisks.
Memphis is an example of an older city with a more “traditional” Egyptian style. It has temples with hypostyle halls, sphinx statues, and colorful wall paintings of gods and hieroglyphics. While the iconography is accurate, many of the paintings are often repetitive and perhaps a bit embellished. They remind me of the drawings in the French Description de l’Égypte of 1809–1829. This is a multi-volume work by scholars and scientists who were with Napoleon Bonaparte when he invaded Egypt in 1798.
The cover of the game falls prey to this embellished mishmash, as it bears a striking resemblance to the frontispiece of the Description de l’Égypte. Both depict an assemblage of Egyptian monuments crammed together in a single majestic view.5 Perhaps this French work was one of the sources developers consulted, and rather than analyzing its subjectivity and colonialist production, they took the images at face value.
Natural Environment
Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ impressive world teems with life due to the inclusion of flora and fauna that would’ve existed in ancient Egypt. Crocodiles lounge on the banks of the Nile and hippopotami swim in its waters. If the player isn’t careful, these animals attack and drain Bayek’s life force. Wildlife roam the outskirts of villages, and Bayek can even hunt them to create weapons and tools to use in combat. Depending on the area, the player encounters date trees, papyrus plants, wheat fields, and fruit in the markets.
Most importantly, Senu, a Bonelli’s eagle, guides Bayek by scouting the terrain and locating enemies with a sweeping aerial view known as eagle vision. While it would’ve made sense to choose a falcon (representing the Egyptian god Horus) as the assassin’s bird of prey, developers consciously chose an eagle native to Egypt to fit in with the Assassin’s Creed lore of “eagle vision.”
Filling in the Gaps
Like with Senu, the game designers used a level of imagination and intentionally changed the setting in some cases. Their goal was to conform to the fictitious Assassin’s Creed lore and increase gameplay experience. The Siwa village is a good example, because it depicts an environment that has left very little in the archaeological record to imitate. While it’s wonderful to get a sense of everyday people and their lives, the setting looks quite like a “typical” African village and is, for the most part, imaginative.
The Library of Alexandria is another instance of imagination because it was destroyed in antiquity, and there are no existing images of it. To create the monumental building, designers used the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, Turkey, as inspo.
Egyptologist Christian Casey cites yet another instance of modification to the terrain. He notes that designers added fictive height to cities and buildings that were historically on flat ground. This addition was to accommodate the climbing and parkour abilities so well-loved in the Assassin’s Creed series.6
The modifications, however, are not an issue. The project director, Ashraf Ismail, stresses that the goal was “authenticity over total accuracy” and for the game to be fiction grounded in history.7 In my opinion, they achieved that goal. We’re playing a video game, not watching a documentary.
Walk Like an Egyptian
The game’s setting and ability to control the characters of Bayek and Aya allow players to become immersed in the ancient world. We get to role-play as ancient Egyptians. As game reviewer Colin Campbell notes, “This is a space of loveliness, a work of art. If you ever wanted to step into the distant past, into a simulation of ancient life, here it is.”8
This stepping into the past through immersion and role-playing allows for an elision of time that scholar Alexa Fryxell notes in her work about Tutmania and Egyptomania in the early 20th century. As with King Tut’s tomb, Origins gives a “sense of dissolving temporal boundaries” and an “’annihilation’ of time.”9 In simpler words, it feels like the game brings us back in time to experience the ancient world for ourselves, while still being physically present in our modern era.
Excavating Egypt
While controlling Egyptian characters, players can explore ancient Egypt from the comfort of our modern couches. The historical period of Ptolemaic Egypt allows us to discover a romanticized and eternal Egypt. By the beginning of the story in 49 BCE, the pyramids and temples of the Old Kingdom are already thousands of years old and in ruin. Here’s a scary tidbit for you: our girl Cleopatra VII is closer to the invention of the iPhone than she is to the pyramids of Giza. Let that sink in…
Anyway, Origins shows that by the Ptolemaic period, sand covered these long-forgotten tombs, and monumental statue heads arose from the ground. Wall paintings were faded and cracked, and fallen colossal columns were strewn all over the place. The aura of these spaces harks back to the Description de l’Égypte and is romantic, exotic, and mysterious.
Wonderful Things in King Tut’s Tomb
As we access the interior of the first pyramid Bayek encounters, we replicate what Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Controlling Bayek, we locate the hidden chamber and, upon entering, see “wonderful things.” These things take the shape of buried treasure glinting in the darkness, or as Bayek puts it, “the riches of the ancients.”
What’s more, as a standard Assassin’s Creed game, players can loot the treasure and thus literally become treasure seekers. Like photographs of King Tut’s tomb, the tombs in Origins are filled to the brim with objects stacked on top of each other; there are shabtis, vases, statues, couches, tables, boats, and, of course, golden objects. As Bayek, we enter a tomb no one has been in for thousands of years, and time seems to slip away. Game reviewer Alanah Pierce stresses this experience when she says, “Plenty of secrets to uncover and the delightful sense of discovery still hasn’t left me.”10
Egyptian Religion in Assassin’s Creed: Origins
The perception of Egypt as a place of secrets, mysticism, and wisdom is another trope we find in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. Throughout the game, players can discover secret papyrus scrolls and solve mysteries. Furthermore, Origins portrays Egyptian religion accurately and infuses it throughout the lives of the characters. Bayek encounters temples dedicated to Amun, Sekhmet, and Serapis, and works alongside temple priests.
The Devourer
One quest involves a ritual performed by a high priest that sends Bayek into a wild dream sequence. He battles a massive snake called the soul eater in an attempt to prevent it from devouring his heart. This sequence is based on scenes from real funerary papyri—known as the Book of the Dead—where a hybrid monster known as the Devourer waits to eat the hearts of the deceased who fucked up in life.
The devourer sits by the scales of truth as the god Anubis weighs the heart against a feather, representing Ma’at. If the scales balance, you’re safe, and the god Osiris welcomes you to the afterlife. If not, the Devourer gets his dinner, and you die forever. Yeesh.
The Duat
By the end of the game, Bayek and Aya enter a sacred vault in Siwa and discover it’s the portal to the Duat. As the Realm of the Dead, it holds the mysteries of mankind. Additionally, the Duat appears each time Bayek assassinates members of the Order. Origins represents the Egyptian underworld as a mysterious watery black environment where the dead receive the feather of Ma’at before they go on their journey in the afterlife. Will they end up as the Devourer’s dinner? Probably, because they’re the bad guys.
While Assassin’s Creed lore is full of mysticism and ancient wisdom—the apple of Eden is a central part of the series—it appears in full force within this Egyptian setting.
Final Thoughts
As a video game, Assassin’s Creed: Origins is successful in portraying an authentic ancient Egyptian civilization and has received positive reviews and praise for this effort. It does, however, fall into some common tropes of Egypt as a romanticized land ripe for discovery. Let’s be real, though, “discovering” ancient Egypt is hella fun. The game, however, does Cleopatra VII a huge disservice, which bums me out.
In the end, though, its main goal is to entertain. As Raphael Lacoste, artistic director of the project, stressed, “even if we’re making historical games, we’re not making documentaries. It’s about creating an interesting, entertaining piece inspired by something real and historical.”11 With that in mind, as a piece of popular culture, Origins has an overall balanced view of ancient Egypt and was a lot of fun to play.
If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Origins or any other AC game, let me know which is your favorite in the comments. Although I love Origins, my favorite is an OG…Ezio Auditore da Firenze, anyone?
Footnotes
- Pearce, “Assassin’s Creed Origins Review.” ↩︎
- Specifically, Sextus Aurelius Victor’s slanderous tale in the 4th century. ↩︎
- Daly, “That Obscure Object of Desire.” ↩︎
- Nielson, “Assassin’s Creed Origins”; Takahasi, “Assassin’s Creed Origins.” ↩︎
- Thompson, “The Discovery of Ancient Egypt”; Riggs, Egypt: Lost Civilizations, 54-57. ↩︎
- Casey, Assassin’s Creed Origins. ↩︎
- Nielson, “Assassin’s Creed Origins.” ↩︎
- Campbell, “Assassin’s Creed Origin Review.” ↩︎
- Fryxell, “Tutankhamen,” 521. ↩︎
- Pearce, “Assassin’s Creed Origins Review.” ↩︎
- Takahashi, “Assassin’s Creed: Origins.” ↩︎
Bibliography & Further Reading
*Several of the following links are Amazon affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Campbell, Colin. “Assassin’s Creed Origins Review.” Polygon, October 26, 2017.
Casey, Christian (April 6, 2020), Assassin’s Creed Origins: A Brief Egyptological Review [Video]. YouTube.
Daly, Nicholas. “That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1994).
Fryxell, Allegra. “Tutankhamen, Egyptomania, and Temporal Enchantment in Interwar Britain.” Twentieth Century British History 28, No. 4 (2017).
Nielson, Holly. “Assassin’s Creed Origins: How Ubisoft Painstakingly Recreated Ancient Egypt.” The Guardian, October 5, 2017.
Pearce, Alanah. “Assassin’s Creed Origins Review.” IGN, November 6, 2017.
Riggs, Christina. Egypt: Lost Civilizations. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2017.
Riggs, Christina. Photographing Tutankhamun: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and the Archive. London, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
Takahashi, Dean. “Assassin’s Creed: Origins – How Ubisoft Created the Art for the Massive Open World. VentureBeat, December 17, 2017.
Thompson, Jason. “The Discovery of Ancient Egypt,” in Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology: 1: From Antiquity to 1881. Cairo Scholarship Online, 2015.
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