Xbox as Time Machine: Exploring Ancient Egypt
In the past 50 years, video games have evolved from mere dots on a black screen into fully fledged worlds of their own. It’s one of the difficulties of talking about them: I mention “video games” and people of slightly different generations imagine very different things. One person pictures Space Invaders and Tetris, a slightly younger person thinks of Mario, and someone else born just half a decade later might imagine the Halo franchise instead. I grew up with the idea that video games were an idle dalliance, a distraction from things that really mattered. But when I returned to video games a few years ago with a used Xbox gifted by my brother, I purchased Assassins Creed Origins and changed my tune. Assassin’s Creed Origins is an incredible, creative achievement, and it has opened my eyes to the potential of the video game as an artistic medium—a medium that is new but that has roots in older traditions and forms of storytelling.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise, launched in 2007, is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. In each, the player controls a character who must invesigate corrupt government officials, track them down, and assassinate them. Three features set this series apart from other games like it: its verticality, focus on stealth, and detailed historical settings. First, the world of Assassin’s Creed is notably vertical: almost everything can be climbed, making virtually no place in the game world off limits. Second, although your character is powerful enough to fight out in the open, the game rewards stealth—whether that means blending into a crowd, jumping into a haystack, hiding in tall grass, or peaking behind doorways. Or perhaps even taking advantage of the game’s verticality by climbing up to the roof of a building, parkouring or zip-lining to a more strategic location, then launching yourself on your unsuspecting target from above.
Apart from its strategic use, stealth also allows the player to explore the hidden corners of the games’s richly realized open worlds. Every game is set in a different historical era: Renaissance Rome, Florence, and Constantinople are a few of my favorites. But also of note are colonial Boston during the American Revolution, Paris during the French Revolution, Victorian London, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, England during the Viking raids, and in one of the most beloved games of the franchise, the islands of the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. The game gives you the complete freedom to explore these places. Did an interesting building catch your eye? Go investigate. What’s more, feel free to climb it and see it from above!
Fayum mummy portrait, a famous example of Roman influence on ancient Egyptian art
In Assassin’s Creed Origins the player controls the assassin Bayek as he explores Ptolemaic Egypt and eventually tracks down and assassinates different members of a nefarious secret society. While Bayek and the secret society are fictional, other characters are historical, such as Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, the architect Vitruvius, and, of course, Cleopatra. The game is a work of historical fiction, and as with any historical adaptation, liberties are taken with historical fact.
Despite this, I must insist that Assassin’s Creed Origins is one of the most amazing triumphs of research I’ve ever seen, which is something I never thought I’d say about a video game until I encountered this one. The game developers put a tremendous amount of time and care into it, even consulting a number of historians and Egyptologists during the process to ensure that the game felt as authentic as possible, a quality that shines even in the nooks and crannies of its enormous open world.
To me, exploring this meticulous world is the chief thrill of the game. Alexandria feels decidedly “newer” than the more ancient Memphis up the Nile, while Cyrene to the west is more Roman in its architecture and character. The pyramids were already ancient by the time of the game’s events, so it’s appropriate that they look like they’ve seen better days. Sandstorms occasionally sweep the desert. As in real life, most of the game’s population live along the Nile, and if you venture west on camelback, you’ll quickly discover a wasteland with occasional oases and dens of hyenas, ibexes, and leopards. Here, there are mountainous crags as far as the eye can see, and in the drier places of the game, the player sees mirages: meteor showers, a silk scarf carried away in the breeze, a single colorful flower alone in a desolate place.
The game developers paid special attention to the holy sites of Egyptian polytheism. At many moments throughout the game, I discovered surprising things in the world, and then did outside research that confirmed their historical accuracy. One of the subplots in Alexandria regards the deity Serapis, a syncrentic deity related to Osiris, who often replaced him and whose worship was promoted by the occupying Roman forces. In the game, as in history, more traditional Alexandrians were disgusted by this “new” deity, seeing the cult as a threat to existing Egyptian traditions. Others, more sympathetic to the Romans, or perhaps eager to insinuate themselves with the Roman authorities, were willing to play ball with Serapis. On another occasion, I was exploring the game and was surprised to discover an enormous crocodile in one of the temples bedecked in jewels and gold. When I researched it, I discovered that the temple of Krokodilopolis (its Egyptian name is Shedet) in the Faiyum region did indeed have tame crocodiles housed within the temple as part of the cult of Sobek, the crocodile deity. It has been a wonderful way to explore history and to encounter and marvel at these things as if at firsthand—more delightful and more real than simply to read it, presented dryly and factually, in a book (“In the temple of Sobek in Krokodilopolis, the preists took care of crocodiles who . . .”). The game abounds in these sorts of surprising details that pique curiosity and have the player setting off in search of answers.
Game still from Assassin's Creed Origins
Even if the Assassin’s Creed Origins takes liberties with its representation of major historical events, it does capture something rare: what it would be like to live in, and actually experience, a different time and place. Indeed, one enthusiastic Egyptologist called it, “the closest thing we have so far to a time machine.” This is history experienced not as you normally might in a history book or class—as a sequence of important names, dates, and events—but as the way ordinary people lived in the past. Exploring the game’s enormous map, you see that Egypt was, first and foremost, an agricultural society. Fields of wheat, barley, and poppies line the banks of the Nile. You head to the Siwa Oasis and discover people cultivating dates (the climate there was particularly suited to them) or to Cyrene, where people grew the medicinal (now extinct) silphium flower. Beside bodies of water, you find papyrus plants (a source of paper) and sometimes hippopotami, which just like in real life, are fiercely territorial and will attack if you get too close. In one memorable mission, the developers show the depth of their research: some children implore Bayek to save a certain “Anta” whom bandits had abducted. Bayek heads to the bandit camp and rescues Anta, who turns out to be an unusual dog called a Tesem, an ancient extinct sighthound breed, which often appears in Egyptian art.
I would be remiss not to mention the violence in the game, which is an aspect of the video game universe that understandably puts people off. I love the game, but it’s certainly not something I would put in front of a seven year old with a casual “enjoy learning about history.” This is another thing about video games that’s difficult to explain to different generations. Many people still associate video games with children, but they are increasingly for adult men and women as well. And just like with films or literature, some video games are for children and some, like Assassin’s Creed, are for mature players.
And further, just like films and literature, video games can imitate life and represent reality and truth artfully and authentically. As I worked my way through Assassin’s Creed: Origins, I witnessed myself responding to the game in a similar way that I respond to a great movie or novel. Playing the game, I experienced what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “poetic faith” by allowing myself to be absorbed into its compelling fictional world, wholly new to me, populated by interesting characters facing truly human problems. Asssassin’s Creed: Origins became a rich source of imaginative knowledge for me; it made me look at the past in an entirely new way and reawakened my current fascination with history, which had lain dormant for years. And because of this, I’m grateful for my experience with it and give it the credit that I would give to any other moving work of the imagination, whether it be written, painted, composed, or in this case, programmed.
Assassin’s Creed Origins taught me that just like novels or films, video games can be sophisticated or juvenile, fantastic or lifelike, comic or tragic, popularist or elitist. Those who are still skeptical about whether video games can be taken seriously as “works of art” should remember that in a time not too long ago, people also said this about films, and going back a little further, also said it about novels. Concerns that video game players confuse the game world and the real world, manifesting virtual into real violence, contain echoes of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whose obsessive reading scrambled his brain and sent him, as the saying goes, “tilting at windmills.” In this bygone age, people who spent all of their time reading novels were considered unconscionably idle, if not vicious for indulging in such a trivial and useless pastime.
Today, on the other hand, most parents would be delighted if their preteen was reading Defoe or Dickens for hours on end. Of course, we should be as discriminating in our choices of what video games to enjoy as we are of which television series, films, and novels we choose to give our attention to. But what work of art gives you the experience of exploring ancient Egyptian tombs; walking through the streets of bustling, well-researched ancient cities; or exploring the desert crags west of the Nile, The Sphinx, the Bent Pyramid, the Temple of Hatshepsut, or the Great Library of Alexandria? It is enough to know that those who are not interested in the game will never have the opportunity to slide down the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza or scale the side of the Pharos, the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, and look out on that city’s beautiful bay by sunlight or moonlight.
Jacob Martin is the principal oboe of the Haifa Symphony Orchestra in Northern Israel. He enjoys writing about the history of art, music, and literature.