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.
A 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 BC
