Meroe — The Iron City

At its height, Meroe was the iron-working capital of Africa — a city whose slag heaps still mark the landscape of Sudan, producing the iron tools and weapons that supplied sub-Saharan Africa for centuries. The city's pyramid fields — over 200 Nubian pyramids, steeper and more numerous than Egypt's — make Sudan home to more ancient pyramids than any country on earth. Meroe was also a literate civilization with its own script, Meroitic, which remains only partially deciphered — one of the last great unsolved writing systems in human history. A civilization that produced iron, pyramids, an original writing system, and warrior queens, almost entirely absent from the history books taught in Western schools.

These signs carry the Meroitic pyramid, the iron furnace, the Meroitic script, and the memory of a civilization history forgot to mention.