The Nile river, which one runs for a few thousand miles through Northeast Africa, was the center of the ancient Egyptian civilization. They began farming in the fecund lands of the Nile River Basin around 3000 B.C.E. and would survive as an independent civilization for almost three thousand years.

Menes is credited by most historians with uniting the Upper and Lower Egyptian civilizations into one empire. This occurred around 2900 B.C.E. and is the beginning of ancient Egypt as we know it.

The Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia resides between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. "Mesopotamia" literally means land between two rivers. The Fertile Crescent is an important part of the early story of human civilization because it was in the abundant flood plains of Mesopotamia that the agricultural revolution took place.

The Phoenicians invented the first alphabetic script in ancient times, in the late second millennium BCE. The Greeks and Romans simply adopted and changed this alphabet. The Egyptians and Sumerians developed hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts, neither of which were alphabetic.

Hammurabi's Code of Laws is the earliest known written-down legal system. Hammurabi was a Babylonian king circa 1800 BCE. The Babylonian civilization existed in various forms for roughly 1500 years from 2000 BCE to 500 BCE. 

The Babylon Captivity is a period of Jewish history when many Jewish citizens of the Kingdom of Judah were captured and forced into exile in ancient Babylon by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar.

The "Babylonian Captivity" of the sixth century BCE involved the forced imprisonment of much of the population of the Kingdom of Judah within the city of Babylon. It ended when Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE and founded the Achaemenid Dynasty of Persia. Cyrus freed the Jewish people and they mostly returned to Judaea.

The Ancient civilization of Babylon existed in the modern-day state of Iraq. Although you might not have known this immediately, you should know that Babylon was a Mesopotamian kingdom and that Iraq is the only modern country on this list which falls in the region of Mesopotamia. 

The Sack of Babylon occurred in approximately 1530 BCE, when the Hittite ruler, Mursili I, marched his army into the heart of Mesopotamia and lay waste to Babylon. It brought about the demise of the Amorite Dynasty of Hammurabi and ushered in a new era of civilizations in the Mesopotamian region.

"Akkadian" is the name of a language group, cultural group, and civilization that predates the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian Empire arose in the Fertile Crescent of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Its main rival to the North was another Akkadian civilization known as the Assyrian Empire. The two fought for centuries for control over the Fertile Crescent and each reigned as hegemonic powers for a period of time.