Egypt
The Nile and its floods, predynastic Egypt and unification, hieroglyphs, the Old Kingdom and the pyramids, pyramid builders' villages, the Middle and New Kingdoms, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Ramesses II, Egypt and Nubia, the Kushite 25th dynasty, Persian, Ptolemaic and Roman rule, the Rosetta Stone and decipherment, and Egypt as an African civilisation.
Three thousand years on the Nile
Egypt is an African civilisation, connected up the Nile to Nubia as much as to the Mediterranean. Jean-François Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822 using the Rosetta Stone, which carried the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. Excavations at Giza led by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass found bakeries and workers' cemeteries, overturning the old image of slave armies building the pyramids.
Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000); Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997); Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010).