Spike apparently has a show all about the "rebel" king, Tutankhamen, called "Tut." I haven't seen it. It's not really my cup of tea. I've seen the trailer, though, and it's delightful in that whole you-wanted-to-make-Game-of-Thrones-didn't-you kind of way. It's also historically inaccurate.

For example, at the 13 second mark, we see a man's execution and Ben Kingsley - playing Grand Vizier Ay - commenting that "this is what it means to be pharoah" (as I said, the riffing of Game of Thrones is merciless). The execution is conducted by this dude with a sword in armour disemboweling a hapless prisoner. The trouble is, though, that this wasn't how ancient Egyptian executions were conducted. If you'll recall, the Egyptians put a great deal of stock in the afterlife and about the importance of the body in the afterlife. It's why they put so much effort into tombs and mummification and preservation - they needed these things in the afterlife, and indeed, going to the good afterlife was a lot of the point of living in Egypt. A proper punishment reflected this belief in the sanctity of the body and that disrupting the transition to a happy afterlife was the worst thing that could happen. What was the solution to that?

Impalement. Yay impalement.

There are numerous writings from across hundreds of years detailing how pharaohs (including Tutankhamen's father, Akhenaten) impaled prisoners of war and people that they believed to be traitorous for one reason or another. The impalements involved driving long bits of pointy wood into the stomach and then waiting for the person to die a long, painful death. In addition to the havoc wreaked by having internal organs mashed up by a spike, ancient Egyptians saw the spike itself as pinning the person's ka to earth, preventing them from journeying to the afterlife at all, a fate worse than death. Disembowelment would not have accomplished that, and was not the preferred execution method of the discerning pharaoh.

We also have baby Tut's hairstyle, once again an example of how dreadfully out of touch with his inner Egyptian this incarnation of Tutankhamen seems to be. On the one hand, it does look like the show got Tutankhamen's age of ascension right. Tut took the throne around eight or nine years old, and I'll accept that this kid is around that age. However, his hair is wrong. Ancient Egyptian children's hair looked something like this, with a lock that was braided or tied, and the rest of the head shaved. Once a child hit puberty, that lock was shaved or the rest of the hair allowed to grow, depending on the sex of the child. However, there certainly would have been none of this luscious locks nonsense before puberty.

And speaking of hair, there's also this image of Tutankhamen all grown up where he once again has the whole sink-into-my-hair look going on. While hair styles absolutely changed over the course of Egyptian history, by the time of Ramesses II roughly seventy years after Tutankhamen's death, short hair or no hair was the style for men. Indeed, busts of Tutankhamen show him as having this short hair, not long hair. Men would wear wigs, but I'm fairly certain that that actor is not wearing a wig.

Ooo! And on the subject of physical appearance, this is not generally something that a person with multiple sclerosis who is forced to walk with a cane does. Or someone suffering from severe malaria. Or...just really, Tutankhamen was one of the posterboys for why incest was a bad idea, and his physical handicaps would have made it impossible for him to go into battle like the trailer for the show suggests. Even more than that, while there were battles depicted inside his tomb, it's unlikely external invasion was his biggest concern as pharaoh. His father was a tad notorious for completely upending the religious system in Egypt, and Tutankhamen would have been dealing with the domestic and economic fallout of this. His chief concerns would have been the crumbling economy and threat of civil war. That's what he likely would have been yelling to his advisers about, not just invading Nubians.

There's an overarching problem as well, and that's the question of political intrigue and Tutankhamen's death. As I said, the show seems to be more interested in reproducing Game of Thrones than historical accuracy, and its focus on political games seems no different. I don't mean to say that there wasn't political intrigue in ancient Egyptian courts - there absolutely was - but rather that focusing on this intrigue doesn't accurately tell the story of Tutankhamen's death. While initial theories were that he had been assassinated, and were based on the fact that there was a giant hole in his head, the current consensus is that he wasn't killed, but likely died of some sort of illness, though what illness, no one is sure. What is known is that he had a badly broken leg and a severe form of malaria, neither of which is fatal on its own, but which together could have been enough to kill him. None of this, of course, seems to be discussed in the trailer, which prefers to present a manly-man image of Tutankhamen that is in no way accurate.

Also, is it just me, or did Tut get whiter over the course of the trailer? Weird.