From the Nile valley kingdoms to the empires of the Sahel, Africa holds some of the longest continuous records of cities, writing and statecraft anywhere. These articles follow Egypt, Nubia, Carthage and the trading states that linked the continent to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
Site G's 1978 trackway was read as three walkers; Site S added two in 2016, and Site A, redug in 2019, led to a claim of two hominin kinds at Laetoli.
· 3,660,000 BCA skull blasted from a South African quarry in 1924 became Australopithecus africanus when Raymond Dart named it in Nature on February 7, 1925.
· 2,500,000 BCThe Homo erectus skeleton Kamoya Kimeu found beside the dry Nariokotome River in 1984, dated 1.60 ± 0.05 million years, with each institution's figures.
· 1,600,000 BCNature published two 2017 papers on skulls unearthed at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, first in a 1961 mining accident, dated by thermoluminescence to 315,000 years.
· 300,000 BCOmo I and Omo II, found in the Kibish Formation, Ethiopia, in 1967, were dated to 195 ± 5 kyr in 2005; a 2022 Nature paper gives a minimum of 233 ± 22 kyr.
· 231,000 BCNine ochre lines on a stone flake from Blombos Cave, South Africa, about 73,000 years old, drawn by Homo sapiens and reported in Nature in 2018.
· 71,000 BCKhufu's pyramid lies within six arcminutes of true north. No Egyptian text says how; Glen Dash of AERA weighed four methods, from shadows to star transits.
· 2560 BCEgyptian crews fed by the state, not slaves, built the Giza pyramids. A town for the workers, their cemetery and gang names inside the pyramid show it.
· 2560 BCAround 1887 cuneiform letters from Babylon, Mitanni and Canaan surfaced at Tell el-Amarna. Dealers split them up; Knudtzon's EA numbers put them in order.
· 1350 BCA 2010 JAMA study counted 130 sticks and staves in Tutankhamun's tomb, many worn by use, and found a mild clubfoot and bone disease in his left foot.
· 1323 BCLater building buried KV62 and its location was lost; floodwater never filled it, the Theban Mapping Project says. It may not first have been his tomb.
· 1323 BCA Berlin museum record says Giuseppe Ferlini opened a Meroë pyramid in 1834 and took gold jewelry, once thought forged, made for Queen Amanishakheto.
· 300 BCPtolemy I commissioned the Pharos in 299 BC and it was finished in 279. Strabo and Pliny describe its white marble, its architect Sostratus and its fires.
· 280 BCPolybius says Hannibal told King Antiochus how, at nine, his father had him swear at an altar never to be a friend of the Romans. Livy calls it a story.
· 237 BCHannibal left Spain in 218 BC with 37 elephants; Polybius gives a five-month march and 15 days in the Alps. His numbers and his pass are still argued.
· 218 BCOn August 2, 216 BC, Hannibal's 50,000 let their center bend back and closed around a Roman army of 80,000. Polybius puts the Roman dead at 70,000.
· 216 BCPriests at Memphis honored Ptolemy V in 196 BC in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. In 1822 Champollion read royal names from it and from a Philae obelisk.
· 196 BCPolybius heard Scipio quote Homer as Carthage fell in 146 BC. R. T. Ridley traced the salted-earth story to a 1930 sentence in the Cambridge Ancient History.
· 146 BCCleopatra VII came from a dynasty of Macedonian origin, yet Plutarch says she spoke many languages. Horace called her a monster; how she died, no one knew.
· 30 BCAksum, in northern Ethiopia, struck gold, silver and bronze coins from the third century AD and raised granite grave markers more than 23 meters tall.
· AD 350Francisco Álvares measured Lalibela's rock-hewn churches twice in the 1520s, giving names, spans and a tradition of who built them.
· 1200The University of Pretoria Museums calls its gold rhinoceros the only artwork of its kind, found in a royal grave on Mapungubwe Hill in the 1930s.
· 1250Ancestors of the Shona built Great Zimbabwe between about 1100 and 1450, a city that lived on cattle, grain and gold. Rhodesia censored the finding until 1980.
· 1300No record gives a weight; the 100 camels and 12,000 slaves are report, not record. Al-Umari, 12 years on, wrote that the gold mithqal fell from 25 dirhams to 22.
· 1324
