Beneath the steps of a temple in Meroe, the southern capital of the Kingdom of Kush in modern Sudan, archaeologists found the bronze head of the Roman emperor Augustus, buried where worshippers would walk on it every day. Kush lasted roughly from 800 BC to 350 AD. After the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II sacked the old capital of Napata around 591 BC, King Aspelta moved the capital south to Meroe in the Butana, a region on the edge of the summer rainfall belt with hardwood forests and rich iron ore. Animal-powered saqia water wheels let farmers irrigate year round, and iron bloomeries fed by charcoal left slag heaps that led Archibald Sayce to call Meroe the Birmingham of Africa.

Power was shared between the king and the kandake, or queen mother, in a matrilineal system where legitimacy passed through the female line. When Rome took Egypt in 30 BC and governor Publius Petronius sacked Napata in 23 BC, the Kushites raided Roman Egypt and carried off the statue of Augustus. The kandake Amanirenas fought Rome to a stalemate, and the Treaty of Samos in 22 BC withdrew Roman garrisons and dropped the demanded taxes. Meroe later faded as Red Sea trade bypassed it, and an Aksumite inscription, likely by King Ezana, marks its end around 330 to 350 AD.

• How a bloomery strips oxygen from iron ore with charcoal and leaves a spongy bloom that smiths hammer into wrought iron
• Apedemak, the lion-headed Kushite war god, and more than 200 steep-sided Nubian pyramids
• The Jewish legend of Moses besieging Meroe with baskets of snake-eating ibises
• Nero’s Praetorian explorers in 61 AD, stopped by the Sudd swamps
• The 23-letter Meroitic script that scholars can pronounce but still cannot read, and Giuseppe Ferlini blowing the tops off pyramids in 1834