Host: No matter what we look like today, we're all directly descended from ancestors who evolved on the African continent.

The oldest human population emerged in Africa.

Africa is the home of the world's most ancient civilizations.

Far too often, Africa has been thought of as isolated and static, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The roots of every family tree trace here to Africa.

And so does the history of civilization.

In this series, we'll be going on a journey through 200,000 years of history.

We'll explore great cities built along Africa's extensive trade networks, discover art of unparalleled beauty and technical brilliance, and marvel at thousands of years of breathtaking architecture.

Driving all this were Africans who prospered, created, and suffered through their rich, sometimes tragic, yet endlessly fascinating history.

This is a seldom-told story of how Africans, by shaping their own worlds, shaped the larger world as well.

Africa's Great Rift Valley.

This is where humanity's story most likely begins.

Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, have lived here for about 200,000 years.

This great geological fault, stretching 3,000 miles through Africa, from Ethiopia to Malawi, with its great lakes and savannas full of animal life, gave our ancestors the perfect environment in which to evolve.

Man: The Rift Valley, it's like a crucible, like in a chemistry lab, where humans have been tested.

Because nature constantly tests different parts of the species.

Those who can fit the environment or the situation that is around survive and continue, and the others, you know, get replaced.

[Thunder] Host: In 1997, the rains fell heavily in Ethiopia's northern Rift Valley.

Layers of sediment dislodged, revealing an extraordinary find-- a human skull.

It's one of the oldest Homo sapien remains to be found anywhere in the world.

Scientists named the skull Idaltu, meaning firstborn, and Idaltu walked these valleys 160,000 years ago.

Dr.

Berhane Asfaw was one of the scientists who made the discovery.

This is one of the few specimens that we found almost complete.

The whole, the face and the brain case.

And the most impressive thing about this is even at this early age, the face is modern Homo sapien, the brain case is modern Homo sapien, the shape from the back is a modern Homo sapien.

It's exactly us.

Host: The anatomy and age of Idaltu's skull provided the strongest evidence yet that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa.

Man: Each stage of the evolution toward modern humans, it takes place in Africa.

Asfaw: When we found Homo sapien Idaltu, it's very important because it pushes the time far back.

It means anatomically modern Homo sapiens started walking on this planet much earlier than we thought, and the interesting thing Is at the same time, Europe was packed with Neanderthals, which are completely different from Homo sapiens.

Host: One of Africa's most respected paleoanthropologists is Dr.

Richard Leakey.

He and his colleagues have made groundbreaking discoveries about how our species evolved on the African continent.

I've come to meet him at his institute in Nairobi, Kenya.

How do we know that the first human beings evolved on the African continent?

The fossil evidence and the archaeological evidence that's come to light in the last 20, 30 years is very, very substantial, testable, and real.

Why do you think this idea was so disturbing in some quarters?

Historically, the science of paleoanthropology or anthropology came into existence at a time when we really knew very little.

Africans were considered primitive, heathen, who knows.

And the origins of the subhuman status of Africans begins, really, in the 18th century.

In the Enlightenment, ironically enough.

They weren't really considered to be one of our species.

Host: Continuing archaeological finds and now major scientific breakthroughs have confirmed that Africa absolutely was the cradle of humanity.

Man: It's like if we're exploring our past and looking at where our roots are sunk down, we'll find that they're the deepest in Africa, and that's where we get most of our genetics.

Host: Geneticists have identified an astonishing link to our earliest human relations through our DNA.

Every living person shares a common direct maternal ancestor.

She's known as Mitochondrial Eve.

We believe that she was part of a small group of humans who lived in this region of Africa around the time of the Idaltu skull.

Man: Our common ancestry through the Mitochondrial Eve means that our genetic differences are literally skin deep.

That at the bottom, we are all descended from the same family.

Host: Mitochondrial DNA, found in our cells, is the genetic signature passed down through females from mother to child.

What it means is that this was a woman, hypothetically, who lived 200,000 years ago, who had enough daughters in a continuous chain, straight back so that her mitochondrial DNA survived.

Absolutely right.

And all of us today, no matter what we look like, are descended from Black ancestors?

Yeah, that is exactly, that's what happened.

All the humans, all the Homo sapiens all over the world, be it yellow, white, Black, we are descended from a common ancestor in Africa.

What would life for human beings 200,000 years ago have been like in this valley?

200,000 years ago, I would imagine the groups were quite small.

Mm-hmm.

The dangers around, we had predators, things like hyenas and groups of carnivores all around.

Mm-hmm.

It's difficult for us to imagine prehistoric life or a world without any trappings of the things that have come to define humanness over the last 10,000 years, and so, in the modern zeitgeist, the only thing that comes close is actually the post-apocalyptic zombie shows, for example.

You have small bands of people roaming the landscape, working together, fighting off predators that are trying to eat them, and worried about the other groups of humans that they might bump into.

So, there are a lot of interesting parallels that could be drawn.

Host: Modern Homo sapiens initially lived only in Africa, slowly spreading across the continent over 120,000 years.

But between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, they began successfully to populate the rest of the world.

Host: So, what happened 80,000 years ago?

Leakey: Well, I wish we knew what happened, but there's no doubt at all that a very small population somewhere in that time zone caught some adaptation that gave them a huge advantage.

I have a feeling it might have been speech.

I don't know what it was.

But they spread very quickly out of Africa.

So, 80,000 years ago, the human community was Black.

Wherever they were in the world.

Host: But when those early human beings migrated out of Africa, they weren't traveling alone.

They were carrying something within them.

And that something had developed slowly, over millennia.

it was culture.

That culture would develop to include the greatest achievements of human creativity, and it began here on the African continent.

In 1991, archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, exploring his grandfather's land, discovered the opening to a cave on a cliff face above the crashing waves where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans collide.

Today, we call this the Blombos Cave.

Inside is evidence of over 140,000 years of human habitation, and signs of the first form of human creative expression.

Before this discovery, we thought the earliest examples of artwork were found in the Lascaux caves in France, dating back only 35,000 years ago.

Hawks: When people began making discoveries in southern Africa, like at Blombos Cave, they realized that actually, this record of artistic production goes back much further than anyone guessed.

In France, cave paintings 30,000 years old, 35,000 at the oldest.

In southern Africa, we're talking about 90,000, 100,000 years.

Woman: Blombos Cave is a relatively recent discovery, so, the more research we do in Africa, and also the more dating we conduct, this will change people's minds of how we saw human history, and the evidence shows they were already assessing the cognitive behavior that we see as defining the modern human before they left Africa.

Host: Small ochre blocks found in the Blombos Cave completely changed how we understand the development of human creativity.

One of these blocks, covered in curious markings, is now housed in the Iziko Museum in Cape Town.

Woman: It's unique in terms of firstly where it was found and the date-- it's pretty old.

77,000 years ago.

Mm.

What is interesting is the etching.

It's almost a hashed etching on the one edge, and that is done with purpose.

I've often thought that if pigment was put on it, you could use it as a stamp, which to me screams artistic expression.

Mm-hmm.

Meaning.

Meaning.

Symbolic meaning.

So, this would make it one of the earliest artistic artifacts that we have.

This is a sign of a group of people who had managed to emerge above immediate concerns for food and basic human survival.

That says something about Africa and Africans.

I think so.

It shows that these people were cognizant of their surroundings.

They were socially aware.

It shows the birthplace of a very rich cultural heritage that has in the past not been recognized.

This is artwork.

Host: Alongside the ochre block, a painting kit was found.

That ochre block was not only decorated, it was ground down, mixed with water and minerals, and used as paint.

Lewis: Once a group is into symbolic expression, whether it be via beads or using colorants to paint the body or to paint walls, that's gonna be another very important behavior to use for communicating complex sets of ideas about group identity and also to help transmit information to other members of your immediate group.

Host: Much of this early art has perished with time, but cave art provides us with the only snapshots of how early human beings lived, hunted, and even loved.

Hawks: We just get the durable element, but when you're painting your skin, when you're painting hides that you might be wearing, when you're using feathers and other kinds of really special objects but perishable objects, you know, when we look at societies today, they have this incredible range of things that would never survive in the archaeological record.

Host: Deep in the Libyan desert, in a remote cave at Wadi Sura, miles from any lush vegetation today, a stunning visual record reveals a quite surprising picture of daily life in the Sahara 7,000 years ago.

The walls of the cave teem with depictions of people swimming and animals grazing, glimpses into a long-lost landscape.

Mire: You have the Cave of Swimmers.

There you have your history recording, if you like, where we are getting an idea of a place where we today cannot even imagine any life surviving.

we have lakes and the depictions of the swimmers and very abundant wildlife thriving in the Sahara, a place now we know for sand dunes.

Host: However, the Sahara was once a completely different environment, capable of sustaining these emerging human communities.

Today, the Sahara is very barren and dry, but from rock art, we find that there are a lot of aquatic fauna, hippo, crocodile, giraffes.

A very vibrant biodiversity.

Host: So, in this case, art verifies archaeological evidence.

Yes.

It tells us more about how the landscape has changed or how the environment has changed.

Abaka: Over 10,000 years ago, the Sahara was actually a green savanna.

There were animals, fishes, lakes, rivers, and right across what is now the Sahara, the environment was green.

Ehret: This was the kind of environment that attracts the great herbivores, the large herding animals.

The hippopotamuses, rhinos.

This would have been a time when those were the important animals.

Host: Although early humans continued to be hunter-gatherers, over time, they began to cultivate plants, and around 10,000 years ago, across Africa and the Middle East, they began to breed animals as livestock and domesticate cattle.

The Sahara became this band where these people spread their livestock grazing.

Mire: Everywhere across the Sahara, you have vast scenes of paintings of these animals, but also, I think, it kind of also shows that this is them going towards the domestication of animals and settle in a sedentary society.

Hawks: When you look at Africa, it's the cradle of mankind, but looking into the development of agriculture, it becomes a cradle of civilization.

[Man speaking native language] Ehret: Between 4,800 and 4,200 B.C., more than 1,000 years before the rise of ancient Egypt, in the areas west of the Nile, the first complex African society forms.

It's not a settled society of towns, but it's people who raise great herds of cattle.

Host: For 3,000 years, these communities, and the world around them, continued to evolve.

Farming developed, and populations grew.

But by 4,000 B.C., vast areas of the lush savanna had turned into desert.

Life for the people of the green Sahara is brutally transformed.

Everything changes, setting civilization in Africa on a radical, new path.

Woman: There was a slow change in climate, thus making traditional pastoral ways of life far more difficult for people.

Host: In the face of this climate change, the populations of the Sahara dispersed.

And many people migrated towards the fertile lands of the Nile Valley, becoming the ancestors of both the Egyptians and the Nubians.

Abaka: The verdant valley of the Nile was an attractive place for communities to settle.

Hawks: The Nile is like this green river through the desert, and the regular floods create this incredible soil, so that once you have the domestication of plants, this becomes the breadbasket of the Mediterranean basin, and you've got that happening as people are developing villages and states.

Ehret: There's pressures that arise as population grows that leads to foundation of more complex societies.

Bradshaw: The population becomes divided between the food-producing groups and the non-food-producing groups, and what we see with the non-food-producing groups is that they become artisans, professional builders, so they have a surplus of food, and this is the point at which we start seeing things that we might call civilization.

Host: Burial pits in the Nile Valley have been the source of rare and unique artifacts dating back more than 6,000 years.

They show a rich, creative culture.

These prestige items were crafted by artisans to be enjoyed by elites.

Host: How old is this?

So, this dates about 3,600 B.C.

Really?

This is 6,000 years ago.

Yeah.

So, the brothers and sisters back in the Nile Valley were combing out their hair with an Afro comb.

Yes.

Just like Afro combs, these long, thick combs would've been perfect for African hair, and this is an item that would proclaim status and identity and make a statement.

They're often found in the burial still in the hair, very prominently placed, so these symbols would've been visible.

Just the way Black people wear them today.

Absolutely.

Black people were combing their hair with Afro combs.

I thought we invented this in the sixties.

[Laughter] Amazing.

So, the burials at that date were pit burials.

In the dry sand, often it preserves organic materials.

We can actually do an archaeology of hairdos and hairstyles.

Oh, what kind of hairstyles?

They've got all sorts.

They've got the use of henna and fake hair and big bouffants.

There's even a suggestion we've got some Mohawks as well.

That's astonishing.

So, the people who made this were highly-skilled craftspeople.

They were making beautiful pottery.

Very skilled at making stone vessels.

All up and down the Nile Valley at this time you see groups creating very vibrant, personal culture that they would wear and display.

Mm-hmm.

Ehret: You get this coming in of people from the Sahara, bringing ideas that even more complex, larger-scale institutions can be built, and then development of little, tiny kingdoms.

Man: Different groups are uniting under powerful figures or perhaps local deities or fetishes or emblems, and then these groups consolidate.

One is victorious over another.

They get larger and larger and smaller in number.

Host: In 1988, archaeologists discovered a tomb at Abydos, 300 miles south of Cairo.

The tomb is thought to contain one of Egypt's earliest rulers, credited with consolidating the lands that would become ancient Egypt.

He's known as the Scorpion King and is believed to have ruled at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.

little is known about him or his reign, but his royal tomb housed 150 small ivory tags covered in carved symbols that helped to rewrite the history of civilization.

These simple ivory tags revealed something astonishing.

Something that overturned what archaeologists believed about how our ancestors communicated.

The symbols on these tags aren't artworks.

They are in fact the world's first writing.

Man: Egyptian writing as we know it, as in fully developed Egyptian hieroglyphs, appear first around 3,250 B.C.E.

and some of the earliest pieces are these little labels, these little ivory tags from Tomb U-j at Abydos.

Host: Similar tags from this burial complex are now kept at the Petrie Museum in London.

This is a formative stage of hieroglyphic writing.

So, what does it say?

It's been suggested that it might be a place name.

This is a prestige item.

And what was it used for?

So, you can see there's a hole just drilled through there, and that would have been tied to a box or a bag, indicating property.

So, this would've said, "This property belongs to Alice"?

[Laughter] It could've done, or it could've said, "This material comes from this part of Egypt."

And do you have any idea what the function of this property identification system was?

This object is only being used by the elite, by royalty, and it's about royal ownership of parts of Egypt, parts of labor, over materials.

Host: We used to believe the first writing began in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq and Syria.

But these small tags proved that writing developed simultaneously and independently here in Africa.

as to which language is older, there's a huge debate that continues to rage.

Darnell: I think we can say that ancient Egyptian writing develops independent of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, and develops really almost at the same time, although this Egyptian writing appears to be in some frequent use a little bit before we seem to get true, fully developed cuneiform.

The concentration of resources led to a concentration of power, resulting in the first kings ruling over wide areas.

Maintaining that power required the ability to communicate, and maximizing the capacity to communicate led to the development of writing.

Abaka: And so, writing became a tool for organizing society.

Also became a tool for domination in that sense.

It became a tool for ruling over people.

Host: The evolution of writing enabled Egypt's rulers to maintain power and established a system of royal ascendancy.

Darnell: It looks as though Tomb U-j, that has this earliest Egyptian writing in it, it's also the first tomb that can be followed in a line of development that leads us right to the pyramids of the Old Kingdom.

Woman: From the first king of the First Dynasty until the pyramids is a relatively short period of time.

So you have the creation of an Egyptian bureaucracy and within a few centuries, you have the construction of the pyramids.

Host: And the most spectacular pyramid of all is the Great Pyramid of Giza.

It's the most famous and the most iconic building in the entire world.

A triumph of scientific innovation and artistic imagination.

Built for the Pharaoh Khufu, who came to the throne around 2,600 B.C.

and ruled for about 27 years, the Great Pyramid took his entire reign to complete.

The project required 2,300,000 stone blocks, each weighing an average of 2 1/2 tons.

The pyramid would remain the tallest building on Earth for nearly 4,000 years.

The Great Pyramid is an African construction, and we shouldn't forget that, and I find it fantastic to think about Khufu and his courtiers sitting around and saying, "We're going to do something "that no one else has conceived of.

Let's make something bigger, more impressive."

Colleen Darnell: With the ancient pyramids, we really see all of the strong suits of ancient Egypt come to the fore.

So you have their geological wealth of limestone and you also have the advanced Egyptian mathematics and engineering skills alongside this very large labor force.

Der Manuelian: You don't pull that off with Hebrew slaves and all of these myths that really have no basis in reality.

The pyramids were built by Egyptians.

They were conscripted from all parts of the country.

When the Nile is in flood, that, of course, plays a role, too.

Colleen Darnell: During those months, farmers could do very little with their fields, and they could be employed to build the pyramids, and that was also part of the ways that you could pay your taxes in ancient Egypt.

But while Egypt would dominate northeastern Africa, further south, on the banks of the Nile in modern-day Sudan, another center of power was growing.

It was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kush--Kerma.

Digging in the Sudanese sand between 1913 and 1916, archaeologists led by Harvard professor George Reisner stumbled across a pit filled with human bones and the burial mound of one of the last kings of Kerma.

Bradshaw: Around 322 remains of humans were found in one elite burial in the eastern cemetery.

This, of course, initially was thought to be human sacrifice.

Host: Reisner estimated the bodies dated back to about 1,500 B.C., but evidence in other burial sites shows the practice of human sacrifice dates back even further.

Bradshaw: Death in Kerma, particularly for the elite, seemed to be something of a spectacle.

However, these may very well have been retainers who would have served the king in life and thus would serve him in death.

Even the idea that these were slaves captured in foreign wars and killed as a sort of triumphal act.

Host: The earliest settlement in Kerma has been dated to 4,000 B.C.

Settlements in Mesopotamia formed into the earliest cities.

But recent archaeological finds show that Kerma was developing into a complex society at the same time.

By 2,500 B.C., it's estimated that the city's population had grown to over 10,000, and its power and wealth rivaled that of its Northern neighbor Egypt.

Today, little remains of what was once a magnificent planned city, built around monumental architecture as grand as that of early Egypt.

Bradshaw: The archaeology of the city itself centered around what seems to be a vast structure.

This is known as the Deffufa.

Different scholars have different ideas about what it could be.

In terms of mud brick architecture, it certainly seems to be the largest and earliest in Africa.

Host: The Nubian kingdom had its own distinct culture and religion and was renowned for its deadly archers.

Host: For over 2,000 years, the kingdoms of Kush and Egypt prospered and grew as kindred civilizations at opposite ends of the Nile valley.

By 1,500 B.C., Egypt was the world's greatest power, controlling trade routes to the Middle East.

But Egypt's gateway to the precious resources of the interior of Africa was Kush.

Kush supplied luxury items such as gold to Egypt's flourishing 18th dynasty.

From Tutankhamen's face mask to the trading expeditions led by Hatshepsut and the wealth amassed by Queen Nefertiti, Egyptian pharaohs required endless supplies of exotic goods to help their passage into the afterlife.

It's difficult to imagine any people anywhere who resisted the finality of death more lavishly than did the Egyptians.

The king's sacred tomb would be filled with every conceivable luxury to accompany him through the afterlife.

Leopard skins, ostrich feathers, ivory, precious stones, and gold from Nubia's bountifully laden mines.

Darnell: Gold is the skin of the gods.

The goddess Hathor, as face of the sun, is the woman's face en face with the cow ears as gold.

Colleen Darnell: It is a metal that never corrodes, and so they recognized this as being the perfect material for funerary goods.

Bradshaw: We see the royals being adorned with gold and we find from myriad, even lesser elite houses, we see gold objects.

Darnell: the gold mining regions of the eastern desert really force the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Nubians to continue the close associations they already culturally had.

It's one of the reasons why Egypt can't let go of Nubia and it's one of the reasons Nubia is both so attractive and potentially dangerous.

The relationship between Egypt and the Kushite kingdom was one of intimacy, proximity, and bitter rivalry.

The Egyptians felt threatened by Nubia and wanted to control the gold mines themselves.

Bradshaw: The kingdom of Kerma and Egypt seemed to have had what you might call a difficult relationship.

At this point, the Egyptians were writing of Nubia as "vile Kush," so we know there was certainly a lot of venom from the Egyptian side.

Eventually, rivalry led to conflict, culminating in a war that would bring to an end 15 centuries of independent Kushite rule.

Hawks: Every time you have civilizations develop in the world, what you have is warfare and bloodshed.

Because other people want the stuff that you've got.

And that becomes a part of the history of civilization.

Host: Around 1,500 B.C., standing at the prow of a flotilla of ships, Pharaoh Thutmose I led his troops to war against the Kushite kingdom.

Thutmose I, not born of royal blood, had served as a general to the previous pharaoh and earned a reputation as a formidable military strategist.

For the Egyptians, Nubia was a very strategic location.

Bradshaw: What we see is Thutmose is going very determinedly to the south.

He sacks the city of Kerma.

To sack the capital city of this kingdom was truly a feat.

The Nubians were well-Known warriors and fighters.

There are stories of thousands of captured prisoners of war being executed in a variety of different ways.

Lest anyone doubt the finality of the conquest, Thutmose strapped the body of the fallen Nubian King to the front of his ship.

"Egypt is the chief," he declared, "while peoples across the whole Earth are her servants."

Colleen Darnell: Nubia became a second part of Egypt.

Bradshaw: The 18th Dynasty is really a period of time when the Egyptian presence in Nubia expands.

Host: For 400 years, the people of Kush would struggle under and against Egyptian rule while Egypt plundered the kingdom's gold mines through annual tribute.

Kushite royal traditions survived, South of the regions that Egypt ruled.

Darnell: All of Nubia is incorporated into Egypt more fully than ever before.

Nubia gets a shadow government that mirrors pharaonic Egypt.

You get a viceroy of Kush, the king's son of Kush, who, like pharaoh, is in charge of all of Nubia.

Host: The Egyptians also brought along their culture and their gods.

Colleen Darnell: We know that already in the 18th dynasty, the ancient Egyptians were building temples in Nubia to Egyptian gods, but Egyptians gods that had a local relevance for the Nubians.

Host: Amun, god of gods in Egypt for 400 years.

700 years later, the Kushites made this all-powerful deity their own, incorporating him into their pantheon alongside their lion-headed god Apedemak.

The Egyptians built an awe-inspiring temple to Amun at the southernmost tip of their Nubian empire at the holy site of Jebel Barkal.

This would also become a sacred place for the Kushites.

Man: For the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Kushites, this pinnacle symbolized a serpent that was a protective deity on the crown of the pharaoh that spit fire and poison at the pharaoh's enemies.

So, this is what gave Jebel Barkal its mystical association that led Egyptians and Kushites to build and rebuild and expand their temples over the centuries.

Host: But after 1,100 B.C., parts of Kush regained their independence, and by 750 B.C., Egypt, following invasions by Libyan tribes, was greatly diminished and fragmented.

Around 750 B.C., Piye, a new Kushite king, came to the throne.

He was brilliant and ambitious, driven in part by his fervent worship of the god Amun.

Emberling: He clearly made Jebel Barkal an important place.

Uh, he built a palace here, he very significantly expanded the temple, and, uh, Barkal was very clearly the center of his symbolic assertion of kingship.

Host: Piye turned his sights northward to Egypt, portraying Kush as the champion of Amun.

Darnell: Nubia appears to see itself as the real Egypt because they're the real worshippers of the Egyptian gods.

Colleen Darnell: It's remarkable that the Nubians adopted Egyptian culture and religion and civilization to the point that they believed that they were better Egyptians than the Egyptians who were currently in control of the Nile Valley.

So, when Piye invades Egypt, he does so in the name of the god Amun.

Piye essentially casts his invasion of Egypt as a holy war, of the re-establishment of the proper worship of the god Amun.

At the head of a powerful army, Piye set sail north down the Nile, ready to invade the once impregnable empire of Egypt.

He ordered his men to purify themselves in the river.

"I shall let Egypt," he said, "taste the taste of my fingers."

In a campaign that lasted nearly a year, Piye's army conquered Egypt as far north as the Nile Delta.

Triumphant, Piye was crowned pharaoh of Nubia and Egypt and founder of the 25th Dynasty of Egypt's pharaohs.

The Kushites, once the conquered, now became the conquerors, reuniting fragmented Egypt under their rule.

Colleen Darnell: We can see the Nubian conquest of Egypt as both a holy war and a strategic expansion to the north, and obviously, it was a great prize to rule both Egypt and Nubia.

Ehret: They're ruling over an empire that runs from Meroe down in the south, clear up to the delta, larger than any territory Egypt itself ever ruled.

Darnell: In some ways, it can be seen as a turning of the tables that Nubia, who's always the underdog, now has Egypt as the underdog.

It simply shows, I think, over and over again, how Upper Egypt and Nubia are so closely associated, ideologically.

Host: This was the start of a new era in Egypt which would see it ruled by a dynasty that historians call the Black Pharaohs of the Nile, restoring prosperity and stability back to Egypt.

But across Africa, in the lush forest of modern-day Central African Republic, new radical technological innovations were laying the foundation for other civilizations.

Sometime between 1,800 B.C.

and 1,500 B.C., small communities of craftspeople gathered to stoke furnaces, intending to fire ceramic.

But in the lateritic African soil, the craftsmen discovered a by-product--iron.

Iron is one of those inventions that actually has a tremendous impact.

Ehret: We suspect the first usages were for decoration, for ornamentation.

But very quickly, people began to see, "Oh, hey, we can shape this."

Woman: Each metal has a certain quality-- iron for its strength, and the kind of tools that one can create with it.

Fourshey: In terms of converting economies from hunting and gathering to agriculture, iron began to be used particularly as currencies, but also in terms of agricultural production.

Host: We previously thought that iron had been discovered in Turkey, around 1,500 B.C., but new evidence reveals that iron working emerged at the same time in Africa.

Bradshaw: For a long time, the idea that iron could be smelted in sub-Saharan Africa was completely dismissed.

Ehret: The new evidence is that ironworking begins right in the heart of Africa.

We find dates of around 1,000 in the Lake Chad area.

900 as we get towards the middle of Nigeria.

700 B.C.

to 500 B.C.

over in Mali.

Showing the spread of iron coming out of that area.

Fourshey: Even with the kinds of technology that we have today, it's incredibly difficult to produce a smelt in the way that people would have, you know, 3,000 years ago.

People talk about civilizations, and they think everything new and exciting begins in the civilization.

Turns out when you look at history, human beings create advanced new technologies out of their own experiences.

They don't have to live in this kind of society or that kind of society.

Host: The ironworking communities of Central Africa left little tangible evidence of their existence behind, but they did leave their technological legacy, together with the sophisticated artistic heritage unique to this part of Africa.

Near the center of modern-day Nigeria during the first millennium B.C., a remarkable artistic tradition of terracotta sculpture emerged.

These pieces are highly sophisticated, intricately detailed, and technically accomplished.

Yet much of the culture from which they were created remains a mystery.

They're known as the Nok terracottas and they are sublime.

In 1943, a farmer from a village called Nok gave archaeologist Bernard Fagg the head of a scarecrow.

On closer inspection, Fagg estimated that the finely sculpted head dated back to around 900 B.C., making it, outside of Egypt, the earliest sculptural art found in Africa.

They have this very elaborate hairstyles and every heavy jewelry around the neck.

So, we assume it depicts people, maybe high ranking people, in ceremonial attire.

Preston Blier: The current thinking is that it was probably traveling artists who were moving around creating these works for individuals.

It could have been courts or distinctive religious traditions.

That certainly makes a lot of sense simply because of the breadth of the distribution of these works.

Ehret: The height of the Nok period is during the last thousand years B.C.

this is the period in the archaeology we know the iron working is reaching this area.

Host: Throughout Central Africa, new communities were taking shape.

From 3,000 B.C., an incredible movement of people and technologies unfolded that would change the face of Africa.

It's known as the Bantu migration.

Fourshey: The migration is particularly significant because about 2/3 of sub-Saharan Africa is populated by Bantu speakers.

By 1,000 B.C.E., Bantu have entered into eastern Africa and societies like the Swahili society that we know of and the Zulu that we know in southern Africa start to emerge.

Host: While the people of Central Africa were building new societies based on iron, this great technological advancement was also transforming the civilizations along the Nile, and nowhere more so than in Meroe.

Built on what was once a fertile green island on the banks of the Nile, Meroe by 500 B.C.

had become the new capital of the independent Kingdom of Kush.

Woman: It was an area that supported agriculture, that had the royal city there.

So, life was probably relatively comfortable for most of the population at Meroe.

Host: The rulers of the Third Age of Kush created a powerful kingdom, evidence of which can still be seen in their monumental legacy at Meroe.

These pyramids were burial chambers for the kings and queens of Meroe.

More than 100 dot the skyline on this island.

The wealth of Kush had been founded on its abundant reserves of gold, which it could trade with the ancient world.

But there was another resource that would generate wealth for the state and would come to define Meroe.

Yellin: It's long been known that Meroe was an ironworking center because there were these enormous slagheaps in their urban part of the town that was used for weapons, iron blades, iron spearheads.

Host: And those weapons would be needed to defend Kush in the face of a new threat.

In 31 B.C., Cleopatra's Egypt-- once the greatest empire in the Mediterranean-- was defeated by the Romans.

The Roman military machine was the most powerful in the ancient world, annexing territories from Britain to the Middle East and Africa.

Now it turned its sights onto Kush.

Yellin: One of the things the Romans did is they pushed the southern boundary of Egypt further into Meroitic territory, and what we do know is that the Meroites started to push back.

Host: Halting this Roman advance would call for strong and decisive leadership from Meroe.

One of the most unusual things about the Kingdom of Kush is the surprising number of queens that ruled.

They were known as Kandakes.

Yellin: In about 100 years, we have 4 of these tremendously powerful Kandakes and they are terrifically effective.

Host: Without doubt the most famous of those queens was a one-eyed warrior named Amanirenas, who risked her life in battle to defend her kingdom and make sure that her people could live securely.

Amanirenas reigned from 40 B.C.

to 10 B.C.

said to have the figure of a man by the Greek philosopher Strabo, she had a fearsome reputation as a military leader and strategist.

For 5 years, Amanirenas led attacks into Roman Egypt, preventing the Romans from invading Kush.

These battles were recorded in Roman documents, but a firsthand account written by the Kushites themselves was recorded in their own Meroitic script.

Host: When does this stela date from?

Man: It dates from the second half of the first century B.C.

so... during the reign of the Queen Amanirenas.

In the case of Meroitic, the writing system has been deciphered already a century ago, but it is the language that is a problem.

So, why with all... computer technologies, why can't we crack the one African written script from the ancient world?

It is a bit as if I was asking you as an English native speaker to read me a text in Polish.

You would be able to read it perfectly, but probably you won't be able to understand it, except place name and names.

This is where we are with Meroitic script.

Well, it's about a particular battle with the Romans.

Exactly.

So, this is giving us the narrated version of the story of the war against the Romans.

Unfortunately, we are not able yet to see what they are saying.

Host: Amanirenas showed her utter disdain for the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar by capturing his bronze bust during an attack on his forces and placing it beneath the threshold of her grand temple to be trodden under foot by all who entered.

So, all the people in the kingdom are stepping over the great Caesar Augustus, is that it?

Man: Yes.

According to the archaeological evidence we have, it's, uh, clear.

She brought back the head of Augustus, of his bronze statue.

Host: Despite the might of the Roman empire, Amanirenas' clever military tactics eventually brought both sides to the negotiating table, where the formidable Nubian queen successfully brokered a peace treaty with Augustus Caesar himself.

Host: Are you telling me a one-eyed Black woman was able to defeat the most powerful army on the face of the Earth in 23 B.C., here in the Kingdom of Kush?

Yes.

Yeah, that's what happened.

Host: Amanirenas, the victorious African queen, would ensure the independence of the Kushite kingdom and its splendid culture for another 400 years.

Human history was born on the African continent, which makes Africa the well spring from which all of the world's history flows.

Africa is the birthplace of art and music, the first writing, agriculture, and systems of laws.

Africa gave us the blueprint for civilization itself.

These records speak to us across millennia as profound refutations of the claim that Africans lacked a history before Europeans arrived.

This is the true history of Africa, and it's only just begun.

In the following centuries, the world's great religions, Christianity and Islam, molded in their infancy in Africa, would grow and transform the fate of the world.

Great empires would prosper and cultures would blossom as a result, but they would also draw the continent into bloody conflict.

"Africa's Great Civilizations" is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

To order visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-Play-PBS.

This series is also available for download from iTunes.