Greece
The Bronze Age Minoans and Mycenaeans, the polis, colonisation, Athens and the birth of democracy, Sparta and the helots, the Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), science and mathematics, Macedon and Alexander, Hellenistic Alexandria, and the debate about Greece's debts to Egypt and the Near East.
Democracy, philosophy, and their limits
Greek writers themselves acknowledged learning from Egypt and the Near East: Herodotus credited Egypt with many Greek religious practices, and the Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician. Martin Bernal's Black Athena (1987) argued that later European scholarship had downplayed these debts; many of his specific claims were rejected by classicists, but the wider point that Greece was part of a connected Mediterranean world is now widely accepted.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities (2009); Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015); Martin Bernal, Black Athena (1987) and Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited (1996).