For thousands of years, mankind has wondered what the deal is with ancient Egypt. All those pyramids, crazy hats, and cat gods don’t just come out of nowhere. And since the world’s greatest archeologists can’t seem to come up with any answers, we must once again turn to television to solve the mysteries of the universe.


In the wake of Fox’s development of its own sexy Egypt series, Hieroglyph, the latest visionary to chime in with an idea about what the deal is with ancient Egypt is Ridley Scott, who, as reported by Variety, will be directing and executive producing a new project for HBO called Pharaoh. The series was created by David Schulner—who previously created NBC’s Do No Harm (which you might remember as the show about the doctor with a face on his hands)—and it will focus on aliens having some kind of influence on the development of ancient Egypt. They’ll probably do this by wearing crazy hats and telling people how cool cats are, and also maybe they’ll look like giant birds or dogs or whatever other things ancient Egyptians were into.

Obviously, Pharaoh has nothing to do with Stargate—despite having almost the exact same premise—but how exactly it differs remains to be seen. We’ll know more if HBO decides to pursue Pharaoh as a full series. Unless it just gets reshuffled into a stealth Stargate reboot, of course, which someone out there wants.