A viral tweet calls out God of War’s design of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet — a character that looks more Aztec than Egyptian. 939K views and 3.3K likes say the fans agree.
🏴 Gorgocutie explains
Alright mythology nerds, let’s break this down.
Sekhmet is one of the oldest and most important deities in the Egyptian pantheon. She’s a warrior goddess of healing, medicine, and the sun — depicted with the head of a lioness and a sun disk on her head (the uraeus). She was the fierce protector of the pharaohs and a divine instrument of destruction. An actual ancient relief of her (right side of the image) shows a lioness-headed woman with a sun disk, wearing a patterned wig, with hieroglyphics carved beside her.
The God of War redesign (left side) gives her teal-green skin, feather armor, and a pharaoh-style headdress that looks more like a Mesoamerican/Aztec aesthetic than anything from ancient Egypt. The green feathers, the layered shoulder plates, the gold pectoral — it reads Quetzalcoatl, not Sekhmet.
God of War games have always taken creative liberties with mythology (Kratos fighting Greek gods while wearing a loincloth was never exactly historically accurate), but the series built its reputation on getting the vibe right. The Greek era nailed the tragic, grandiose feel of Hellenic myth. The Norse era captured the cold, fatalistic world of the Eddas. But this Egyptian take — mixing Mesoamerican visual language into an Egyptian character — is getting called out because it feels like they just picked a pantheon without doing the homework.
The irony? The actual Sekhmet relief on the right cost zero research to find. It’s a Google image search away.
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