Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt, also called the Land of the Pharaoh and the River Empire, was a distant southern land where the Egyptian gods dwelt, an old and advanced civilization far removed from both Greece and the Norse realms. Its name and its treasures crossed the long road of Kratos, from the wars of his Greek years through his exile in its deserts and on to the vaults of Tyr in the north.

A distant southern land#

Ancient Egypt was a region of the World where the Egyptian gods made their home, and a civilization at once very old and far advanced in craft and learning. To those of the north it was a remote place; Mimir named it the River Empire and described it as a desert land far from the Norse realms, a place he had never visited but had heard was lovely. Its gods kept their own ways, and at least one of them, the wise Thoth, would walk openly among mortals in disguised forms.

In the wars of Greece#

Egypt brushed against the affairs of Greece even in the days of Olympus. It was told that Ares had gone south to wreak havoc within Egypt for reasons of his own, and that he later confronted Poseidon upon the Egyptian shore of the Mediterranean, by the great lighthouse of Pharos, over the matter of Kratos being set to slay the Hydra. The land's reach extended toward Greece by other means as well, for a pilgrim from the Land of the Pharaoh once journeyed toward the oracle at Delphi and perished of the cold along the way, leaving his message behind for Kratos to find.

The exile of Kratos#

In the long years of his exile, after Greece lay in ruin behind him, Kratos wandered south into Egypt. His name had traveled before him; the people of the land knew him as the god-slayer who had killed most of the Olympians and brought down Greece, and at the sight of the Spartan they fled and hid in terror. Through this time he was haunted by the Blades of Chaos, which returned to him no matter how he sought to be rid of them, and he was watched over by a strange elderly scribe and by a talking ibis and baboon, all of them forms taken by the god Thoth.

When a monstrous crocodile came to terror the land, the people had no recourse but to beg Kratos to slay it, and their endless pleading drove him near to madness. He killed the beast at last, though their village was left in ruin, and then a still greater threat appeared in the shape of a giant hippopotamus that flung the Spartan aside and struck him senseless. After a vision in which Athena and Thoth bade him embrace his purpose, Kratos rose and tore the great beast apart with the Blades of Chaos. Thoth came to him once more in a dream, naming his purpose fulfilled and promising fortune as his path bore him onward, and Kratos went on into the night.

The mark of Egypt in the north#

The memory of Egypt endured even into the Norse realms. Tyr, ever a wanderer and a student of distant peoples, had journeyed to Egypt to learn its culture and its ways, and the proof of his travels lingered in the vaults of his temple, where Egyptian treasures were kept, among them a pharaoh's crook and flail. The language of Egypt, its hieroglyphs, was one of the three tongues engraved upon the Mask of Creation. In later days a stolen treasure of Egyptian make was found within the ruins of the Oarsmen, and Tyr was known to wield a pair of khopesh, the curved swords of that southern land, in his sparring.