This reminds me of my current Scipii campaign.

It's around 190 B.C. I've taken Rome and southern Italia, all of Spain, southern Greece (to include Crete and Rhodes), and all of North Africa from Mauretania to the Nile Delta. I was so busy with the Spaniards, the remaining Romans, and pushing the Egyptians out of their major cities that I wasn't terribly curious about anything east of Alexandria.

Then I get a message saying that Egypt has been annihilated and this piqued my curiousity. Who was cutting up the rest of the Ptolemaic empire while I was slaughtering her major armies? So I get map information from the first civilization I see, which was Pontus, and find that Pontus has taken all of Asia Minor, Armenia, Parthia....pretty much everything the Egyptians had and more.

I've never seen Pontus do so well. Generally they don't do well even against the Seleucids, much less Armenia, Parthia, and Egypt. It would have been very interesting to have seen exactly how they pulled it off.