Ancient Empires Before Alexander 3

This is the final episode of great empires. These empires are of the "much more well known" variety. This is primarily about the Persia and Carthage and a few of their "pretenders". Carthage is perhaps the most fascinating because so little is known of them. They set up a great empire, and were doing great when they just happened to fall on the bad side of Rome. What would have happened if Hannibal had sacked Rome?

The Persians are more historically known. However some of their compatriots are equally mysterious. And the life of Persia that we know tends to be very Greek-centric (since it is the Greek records that we have today.) Again, it begs the question of what we are missing in the history that we know today.