In 1900, inspectors checking an Egyptian site after a robbery found a massive stone block sticking out of the sand beside a crumbling pyramid. It turned out to be the pyramidion, the sacred capstone, of Pharaoh Amenemhat III, carved nearly 4,000 years ago at the height of Egypt's Middle Kingdom. Weighing four and a half tons, inscribed with the king's eyes gazing into the sunrise for eternity, it was designed to crown the Black Pyramid at Dahshur. But almost nothing about this stone's story goes the way it was planned.

The Shroud of Turin is one of the most studied, and most subsequently disputed, objects on Earth. A faint image of a crucified man on a strip of ancient linen, it has been called both a miraculous relic and a medieval forgery. In this episode, We trace the Shroud's full documented history: from a French knight who first displayed it in the 1350s, to the bishop who immediately called it a fake, to the amateur photographer whose 1898 negative seemed to reveal a hidden face. We examine the 1978 STURP investigation where scientists spent 120 straight hours with the cloth and still couldn't explain the image. We dig into the radiocarbon dating that placed it squarely in the medieval period, and the challenges to that dating, from contested X-ray studies to claims the sample came from a repaired corner. Along the way, we evaluate the pollen evidence, the blood stain analysis, the cadaver experiments, and the replica that an Italian chemist built using only medieval materials.

In Chicago sits a 3,200-year-old golden statue that its own museum has called two different gods. First it was Baal. Now the label says El. Some scholars think he might not be a god at all but just a human ruler.