The pharaoh who sent a fleet around Africa
Around 600 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus reports, the pharaoh Necho II dispatched a Phoenician fleet that set out from the Red Sea, sailed down and around the entire coast of Africa, and returned some three years later through the Strait of Gibraltar — if it happened, a feat not matched until Europeans rounded the Cape of Good Hope more than two thousand years later. Necho II also began cutting a canal to link the Nile to the Red Sea, a project left unfinished in his reign.
How we know
Necho II reigned c. 610-595 BCE (26th Dynasty); Herodotus, Histories 4.42, reports the Phoenician circumnavigation (~3 years, returning via the Pillars of Heracles) and 2.158 the abandoned Nile-Red Sea canal, later completed by Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE). 600 BCE to Vasco da Gama's rounding of the Cape 1497-98 CE.
One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.