The most famous mummy in history was not a pharaoh but a god hacked to pieces by his own brother. This episode treats the Osiris myth as a biography, drawing on the Pyramid Texts, the Ikhernofret Stela, and the later Greek accounts of Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus. It begins with his reign as a civilizing king born of Geb and Nut who taught early Egyptians to abandon cannibalism, cultivate wheat and barley, forge tools and make wine, then toured the world with Anubis, Pan, satyrs and the Muses to spread agriculture and culture.

The hosts then work through Set's assassination plot with a custom-fitted chest sealed in molten lead before 72 accomplices, the chest's journey to Byblos and its enclosure inside a tamarisk pillar, Isis's recovery of the body, Set's dismemberment of it into 14 or 26 pieces, and Isis and Nephthys binding the reassemb ...