About the show
Gods in the Dust
Mariana Eaker and Tyson Lukowski start each episode from a real object or text, give the extraordinary reading a fair hearing, test it, and follow the power behind it.
What we do
Each episode begins with one object or text that survived from the ancient world. We say what it is, where it was found and where it's held today. Then we take the strangest reading of it seriously enough to test it.
We keep four things apart: the object, what the ancient source claims, the modern theory, and what remains unexplained once the evidence runs out. Sources for every episode are on its page, with the translation or edition named.
Season One: The First Cities
Ten cases from Mesopotamia, where cities, kingship and writing first developed together. The season asks one question: Who taught human beings to live under systems larger than themselves?
The hosts
Mariana Eaker is the investigative anchor. She separates artifact from inference. Tyson Lukowski is the myth researcher who follows an alternative reading until it stops predicting the evidence. Neither one is the skeptic who is always right.
Mariana and Tyson are recurring fictional presenters performed with custom young American synthetic voices. Their names were sampled from U.S. Census Bureau name-frequency tables and don't represent real people.
Images and models
Cover art starts from documented photographs of the actual objects. 3D models labeled as Ockelwog reconstructions are built from museum photographs for editorial presentation; they are not research scans. The Episode 01 model of the Weld-Blundell Prism is “The Sumerian King List” by Ingmar Franz, used under CC BY 4.0.
From Ockelwog
Gods in the Dust is written and produced by Ockelwog, a home for the curious.