History has a nasty habit of crumpling itself up like an old map. We like to imagine everything ancient happened roughly at the same time — pyramids, pharaohs, and plagues all stacked neatly in the “really old stuff” section of the mental filing cabinet. But if you think Cleopatra swanned about the Nile while workers were still dragging stones up ramps for the Great Pyramid of Giza, brace yourself. Your sense of historical distance is about to be thoroughly humiliated.

The Great Pyramid: Khufu’s Big Project

The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC, a date so distant it makes even Methuselah look like a late bloomer. It stood as the tallest man-made structure on Earth for over 3,800 years — until Lincoln Cathedral in England nabbed the title in the 14th century. When the pyramid was new, mammoths were still wandering parts of Siberia. Think about that: while Khufu’s workers were sweating under the Egyptian sun, shaggy Ice Age leftovers were still munching tundra moss.

Fast forward nearly two and a half millennia — a span longer than all of recorded Western history up to the Renaissance — and along comes Cleopatra, born in 69 BC. That’s 2,491 years after the pyramid’s completion. To put that gap in perspective, Cleopatra was closer in time to us than she was to the guy who commissioned the most famous pile of limestone on Earth.

Man on the Moon

And speaking of “closer to us,” let’s invite another guest to this temporal party: Neil Armstrong. He made that small step for man and giant leap for mankind in 1969 — a mere 2,038 years after Cleopatra’s birth. Do the math and the result is both mind-bending and slightly insulting to how we imagine “ancient.” Cleopatra is closer in time to the moon landing than she is to the Great Pyramid. She had more in common chronologically with Star Trek than with the man buried inside that colossal tomb.

Cleopatra: Closer Than You Thought

And here’s another time-bending twist: Cleopatra’s world already contained its own version of “ancient ruins.” The Great Pyramid, by her lifetime, was over 2,500 years old — older to her than the Roman Colosseum is to us. She could have taken a romantic sunset chariot ride past a structure that was already considered a wonder of a lost age. It’s a bit like us building condos next to Stonehenge and calling it “quaint old architecture.”

She wasn’t the only one peering back at deep history, either. By Cleopatra’s reign, the Library of Alexandria was home to scholars who pored over texts from Mesopotamia that were already ancient to the Greeks. One Babylonian text they studied — a mathematical tablet known as Plimpton 322 — had been written more than 1,300 years before the Old Kingdom even existed. Cleopatra’s scholars were studying their ancient history about people who lived before her ancient history. Time, it seems, has more layers than a baklava.

And if that’s not enough to make your internal timeline wobble, consider this: the Oxford University Press — yes, the same publisher that gave us the Oxford English Dictionary — was founded in 1478. That means Cleopatra’s death (30 BC) is closer in time to the printing of Harry Potter than the Great Pyramid’s construction is to her coronation. And Cleopatra herself? She was sipping imported wine from Rome less than a century before Jesus was born and just 21 years before the Roman Senate stabbed Julius Caesar into the afterlife.

So the next time you picture Cleopatra reclining under the shadow of a “new” pyramid, adjust your mental image. She lived in a world where the pyramids were already as old as cave paintings are to us. Yet from her lifetime to humans hopping about on the moon was less time than separates us from the fall of the Roman Empire. History isn’t a tidy line of dominoes; it’s a mess of overlapping timelines, stubborn ruins, and improbable overlaps. And that’s exactly what makes it so fun.

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