Africa's Great Civilizations (2017)

On the northern bank of the Sand River in the Mala-Mala Game Reserve in South Africa, seven magnificent creatures reside in an area the size of Manhattan Island. Tracking them for 24 hours reveals the invisible threads that bind the cheetah, the hyena, the lion, the buffalo, the rhinoceros, the elephant and the leopard together in a never-ending daily drama. This action-packed film shows how seven individual stories become one, and how the animals move in and out of one another’s lives in the course of a single day. Sometimes their encounters happen just by chance, at other times they are intent on stalking each other down. In all cases whenever they meet the encounter is always riveting.

The early civilizations of the Near East during the Bronze Age (3500–1000 B.C.) and Early Iron Age (1100–500 B.C.) have been the preserve of archaeologists and linguists. Before the late 19th century, these civilizations were unknown, save for brief, often inaccurate biblical references. To modern readers, these civilizations are remote and forbidding, in contrast to Classical Greece and Rome. Yet each year, discoveries and scholarly publications have revealed the fundamental contributions of the ancient Near East to later Western civilization. Therefore, this course presents the main achievements and contributions of these early civilizations from Sumer to Achaemenid Persia.

On the northern bank of the Sand River in the Mala-Mala Game Reserve in South Africa, seven magnificent creatures reside in an area the size of Manhattan Island. Tracking them for 24 hours reveals a never-ending daily drama.

Where do we come from? How did our ancestors settle this planet? How did the great historic civilizations of the world develop? How does a past so shadowy that it has to be painstakingly reconstructed from fragmentary, largely unwritten records nonetheless make us who and what we are?