Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is one of those facts that seems wrong the first time you hear it, so it is worth doing the math.

The Great Pyramid was built for the pharaoh Khufu, who reigned in the middle of the 26th century BCE. It is usually dated to around 2560 BCE. Cleopatra VII, the famous last queen of Egypt, was born in 69 or 70 BCE and died in 30 BCE. Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969. From the pyramid to Cleopatra’s birth: roughly 2,500 years. From her death to Neil Armstrong’s first step: about 2,000 years. As Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, she lived hundreds of years closer to our time than to the construction of the Great Pyramid.

The confusion comes from the way we store history in our heads. Pyramids, mummies, hieroglyphs and Cleopatra all go into the same drawer labeled “ancient Egypt”, as if it were a single period. In fact, Egyptian civilization lasted about three thousand years. For Cleopatra, the Great Pyramid was already a monument from a remote past, older to her than the Roman Empire is to us. It was also the tallest structure built by humans, a title it would keep for nearly 4,000 years, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral, in England, surpassed it in the 14th century.

Cleopatra herself is a good example of how mixed that “ancient Egypt” was. She belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, descended from Ptolemy, a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great. Her family spoke Greek and had ruled Egypt for almost three centuries. According to the Greek writer Plutarch, she spoke many languages, and she was the first ruler of her dynasty to learn Egyptian, the language of the people she governed.

Once you start looking, the timeline is full of surprises like this. When the pyramids at Giza were being built, woolly mammoths were still alive. The last population survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago, according to genetic and fossil studies reported by National Geographic. Another favorite: the University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire. The university itself says that teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096, while Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, was founded around 1325.

The same trick works in the other direction. The dancing plague that gripped Strasbourg in 1518 feels like a medieval legend, yet it happened a generation after Columbus reached the Americas. And Voyager 1, now the most distant human-made object, was launched only eight years after Apollo 11.

Why does this matter? Because the way we picture the past shapes the way we understand it. Seeing Cleopatra as almost a modern figure, who looked at the pyramids the way we look at ancient ruins, makes it easier to understand that she was a political leader of her time, dealing with Rome, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and not a character from the dawn of history.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica (One Good Fact); NASA (Apollo 11); Plutarch, Life of Antony; National Geographic; University of Oxford (Our history); Smithsonian Magazine. Cover: the pyramids of Giza, by Walkerssk, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.