Africa in the classical world (800 BC – AD 500). Greece, Rome, Persia, the Qin and Han, the Maya: the age of the great classical states and the written histories that describe them. These articles cover their rise, their wars and the everyday lives their ruins preserve.
The Lighthouse of Pharos — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — stood in Alexandria, capital of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty. Roughly 100 meters tall and built in three tiers, its summit fire guided ships across the Mediterranean into the harbor, completed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus around 280 BC.
· 280 BCAs a boy of about nine, Hannibal is said to have sworn at an altar never to be a friend to Rome — an oath his father Hamilcar Barca set in him after Carthage's defeat in the First Punic War, told by the historian Polybius.
· 237 BCWhy did Hannibal lead war elephants over the Alps? The sea was Rome's, so Carthage's general took the road no one expected — and trapped Rome at Cannae.
· 218 BCAt Cannae (216 BC), the outnumbered Hannibal drew Rome's larger army into a double envelopment and turned its numbers into a trap — still taught in military academies 2,200 years later.
· 216 BCIn 196 BC the Rosetta Stone recorded a decree honoring Ptolemy V in three scripts — hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. Found in 1799, its readable Greek let Champollion decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs around 1822, reviving a dead script.
· 196 BCCleopatra's 'seductress' image is Octavian's propaganda. The real last pharaoh ruled with language, diplomacy and strategy — a stateswoman, not a beauty.
· 30 BCEgypt's last pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, was Greek by blood — the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt for 300 years, and she was the only one who learned Egyptian.
· 30 BC