Forgotten Ancient Civilizations
The typical history textbook has a lot of ground to cover and only so many pages to devote to anything before Jesus. For most of us, that means ancient history is a three-card trick-Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Which is why it's easy to get the impression that, outside of those three, our map of the ancient world is mostly just blank space. But actually nothing could be further from the truth. Plenty of vibrant and fascinating cultures existed outside that narrow focus. Let's fill in the blanks.
Aksum
The kingdom Aksum (or Axum) has been the subject of countless legends. Whether as the home of the mythical Prester John, the lost kingdom of the Queen of Sheba, or the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, Aksum has long been at the forefront of Western imaginations. The Ethiopian kingdom of reality, not myth, was an international trading power. Thanks to access to both the Nile and Red Sea trading routes, Aksumite commerce thrived, and by the beginning of the common era, most Ethiopian peoples were under Aksumite rule. Aksum's power and prosperity allowed it to expand into Arabia. In the third century A.D., a Persian philosopher wrote that Aksum was one of the world's four greatest kingdoms, alongside Rome, China, and Persia. Aksum adopted Christianity not long after the Roman Empire did and continued to thrive through the early Middle Ages.
If not for the rise and expansion of Islam, Aksum might have continued to dominate East Africa. After the Arab conquest of the Red Sea coastline, Aksum lost its primary trade advantage over its neighbors. Of course, Aksum had only itself to blame. Just a few decades earlier, an Aksumite king had given asylum to early followers of Muhammad, thus ensuring the expansion of the religion which was to unmake the Aksumite empire.
Kush
Known in ancient Egyptian sources for its abundance of gold and other valuable natural resources, Kush was conquered and exploited by its northern neighbor for nearly half a millennium (circa 1500-1000 B.C.). But Kush's origins extend far deeper into the past-ceramic artifacts dated to 8000 B.C. have been discovered in the region of its capital city, Kerma, and as early as 2400 B.C., Kush boasted a highly stratified and complex urban society supported by large-scale agriculture.
In the ninth century B.C., instability in Egypt allowed the Kushites to regain their independence. And, in one of history's greatest reversals of fortune, Kush conquered Egypt in 750 B.C. For the next century, a series of Kushite pharaohs ruled a territory that far outstripped their Egyptian predecessors. It was the Kushite rulers who revived the building of pyramids and promoted their construction across the Sudan. They were eventually ousted from Egypt by an Assyrian invasion, ending centuries of Egyptian and Kushite cultural exchange. The Kushites fled south and reestablished themselves at Meroe on the southeast bank of the Nile. At Meroe, the Kushites broke away from Egyptian influence and developed their own form of writing, now called Meroitic. The script remains a mystery and still has not been deciphered, obscuring much of Kush's history. The last king of Kush died in A.D. 300, though his kingdom's decline and the exact reasons for its demise remain a mystery.8YamThe Kingdom of Yam certainly existed as a trading partner and possible rival of Old Kingdom Egypt, yet its precise location has proven nearly as elusive as that of the mythical Atlantis. Based on the funerary inscriptions of the Egyptian explorer Harkhuf, it seems Yam was a land of "incense, ebony, leopard skins, elephant tusks, and boomerangs." Despite Harkhuf's claims of journeys overland exceeding seven months, Egyptologists have long placed the land of boomerangs just a few hundred miles from the Nile.
The conventional wisdom was that there was no way ancient Egyptians could have crossed the inhospitable expanse of Saharan Desert. There was also some question of just what they would have found on the other side of the Sahara. But it seems we underestimated ancient Egyptian traders, because hieroglyphs recently discovered over 700 kilometers (430 miles) southwest of the Nile confirm the existence of trade between Yam and Egypt and point to Yam's location in the northern highlands of Chad. Exactly how the Egyptians crossed hundreds of miles of desert prior to the introduction of the wheel and with only donkeys for pack animals remains perplexing. But, at the very least, their destination is no longer shrouded in doubt.
The Xiongnu Empire
The Xiongnu Empire was a confederacy of nomadic peoples which dominated the north of China from the third century B.C. until the first century B.C. Imagine Genghis Khan's Mongol army, but a millennium earlier . . . and with chariots. A number of theories exist to explain the Xiongnu's origins, and at one time some scholars argued that the Xiongnu may have been the ancestors of the Huns. Unfortunately, the Xiongnu left few records of their own behind. What we do know is that Xiongnu raids on China were so devastating that the Qin emperor ordered the earliest construction work on the Great Wall. Nearly half a century later, the Xiongnu's persistent raiding and demands for tribute forced the Chinese, this time under the Han dynasty, to refortify and expand the Great Wall even further. In 166 B.C., over 100,000 Xiongnu horsemen made it to within 160 kilometers (100 mi) of the Chinese capital before finally being repulsed. It took a combination of internal discord, succession disputes, and conflict with other nomadic groups to weaken the Xiongnu enough for the Chinese to finally assert some semblance of control over their northern neighbors. Still, the Xiongnu were the first, and the longest lasting, of the nomadic Asian steppe empires.
Greco-Bactria
Too often, in recounting the life and conquests of Alexander the Great, we fail to remember the men who followed him into battle. Alexander's fate is well documented, but what of the men who bled for the young general's conquests? When Alexander died unexpectedly, the Macedonians didn't just head home. Instead, their generals fought one another for supremacy before carving up the empire among those left standing. Seleucus I Nicator made out pretty well, taking for himself pretty much everything from the Mediterranean in the west to what is now Pakistan in the east. However even the Seleucid empire is fairly well known compared to the splinter state of Greco-Bactria. In the third century B.C., the province of Bactria (in what is now Afghanistan and Tajikistan) became so powerful that it declared independence. Sources describe a wealthy land "of a thousand cities," and the large amount of surviving coinage attests to an unbroken succession of Greek kings spanning centuries.
Greco-Bactria's location made it a center of