Three thousand years ago, an Egyptian pharaoh was murdered in his own palace — and for three thousand years, no one could prove it happened.

In the first episode of A History of Iniquity, Ryan Wolf travels to the twilight of Egypt's golden age to tell the story of the Harem Conspiracy: the secondary wife, Tiye, who plotted to assassinate Ramesses III and crown her own son, and the web of officials, magicians and even the king's own doctor drawn into the plot. But the world comes first. Before the crime, we build the kingdom around it — a civilisation already impossibly ancient, holding the line against the mysterious Sea Peoples, where the men who built the royal tombs staged the first recorded strike in history. Then comes the iniquity. And finally the reckoning: cursed names, mutilated judges, and a murder unsolved until, in our own century, a CT scanner found the wound beneath the bandages.

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Sources for this episode include: the Judicial Papyrus of Turin (and the related Rollin and Lee papyri); Z. Hawass, S. Saleem et al., "Revisiting the harem conspiracy and death of Ramesses III," BMJ (2012); S. Saleem & Z. Hawass, Scanning the Pharaohs (2016); records of the Deir el-Medina strike (the Turin Strike Papyrus); and reporting from National Geographic and the Museo Egizio, Turin.

A note on how this show is made: I make A History of Iniquity because I love learning this history myself — I'm discovering right alongside you. Each episode is researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, then checked, shaped, fact-checked and narrated by me, Ryan Wolf. The history is real, the sources are cross-checked, and where the record is uncertain, we say so. For sources, further reading and more, visit brevityplus.com.

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