Beneath the steps of a temple at Meroe, in what is now Sudan, archaeologists found a bronze head of the Roman emperor Augustus, buried where every worshiper would tread on it. Kushite soldiers had carried it off from Roman Egypt as a trophy. Moments like that one are easy to miss if you grew up hearing that Africa had no history before Europeans arrived, a claim that once passed for scholarship and still lingers. The real story is older, stranger and far more connected to the rest of the world: queens who bargained with Rome, a king whose pilgrimage made gold cheaper in Cairo, stone cities that colonial rulers refused to credit to the people who built them.

You will learn how historians read the past from spoken epics, iron slag, borrowed words and radiocarbon dates, and why each source needs testing. You will follow the slow spread of farming languages across half a continent, the trade towns of the Sahel and the Indian Ocean, and then the centuries of slaving, conquest and liberation that shaped modern African states. The payoff is a trained eye for both the old stereotypes and the romantic myths that replace them, and the habit of judging claims about Africa's past by the evidence behind them.