1200 - 264 BCE - The expert Mediterranean traders that the Greeks called the Phoenicians, who established the important colony of Carthage, the principal centre of Phoenician politics.

701 BCE - Assyria under the rule of Sennacherib needed to subjugate the Kingdom of Judah under the rule of Hezekiah.  Sennacherib wanted the Judean capital city of Jerusalem, but first he would need to take the city of Lachish.

2000 - 610 BCE - The incredible story of an empire that survived the Late Bronze Age Collapse and then dominated the Near East like no other before, with iron age technology and an aggressive foreign policy.

1200 - 1050 BCE - All of the societies of the Near East either weakened considerably or disappeared altogether.  What could have possibly happened to cause this dramatic turn of events?

1700 - 1200 BCE - The first Indo-Europeans documented arrived in Anatolia and completely changed the face of the Near East, even going toe to toe with the mighty Egyptians, as well as the revived Assyrians.

1900 - 1595 BCE - Semitic speakers from the west had established their own kingdoms throughout Mesopotamia.  The Babylonians became the most powerful of the first half of the second millennium BCE especially under the lawmaker king, Hammurabi.

3000 - 2000 BCE - The fascinating rise and fall of this iconic Sumerian city-state and a look at the incredible work of Sir Leonard Woolley.

2300 - 2083 BCE - Sargon the Great conquered Sumer and extended what some refer to as the first Empire.  This is the story of the earliest known civilised Semitic speakers.

3000 - 2340 BCE - The first known civilisation of Mesopotamia.  Separating fact from myth within the first cuneiform writings, and the Sumerian conquest and decline.

We take a brief look at the unignorable prehistoric cave art of Lascaux and why it could have been created.