What do you think of this fact?
Pyramids, pharaohs, Cleopatra: in our heads, it all goes into one drawer labeled “ancient Egypt.” But that drawer is huge. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Do the math
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2600 BC as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu. Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC. That’s roughly 2,570 years between them.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on July 20, 1969. From Cleopatra’s death to that moment, just under 2,000 years passed. So the gap to the pyramid is more than half a millennium bigger.
For Cleopatra, the Great Pyramid was already ancient. It had been standing for over 2,500 years when she ruled. Kind of like how the early Romans feel impossibly far away to us.
Cleopatra wasn’t exactly a typical Egyptian
Another detail that often gets lost: Cleopatra belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was of Macedonian Greek origin. The family descended from Ptolemy I, a Macedonian Greek general. Her first language was Greek.
Cleopatra ruled from 51 to 30 BC and was the last active ruler of that dynasty. But she was the only Ptolemaic ruler known to have learned Egyptian. According to ancient accounts, she spoke several other languages too.
Why this surprises us
The problem is our sense of time. Anything older than a few hundred years just feels equally “old.” But ancient Egyptian history stretches across millennia, longer than the entire span from Cleopatra to today.
The Great Pyramid was originally about 146 meters, or 481 feet, tall and remained the tallest human-made structure in the world for thousands of years.
To Cleopatra, the pyramid was what ancient ruins are to us: a monument from a distant past. Just quite a bit older.