Cleopatra Closer to Moon Landing

Our minds often compress the immense timeline of ancient Egypt, picturing pharaohs, pyramids, and Cleopatra as part of a single, continuous story. In reality, the Egypt that Cleopatra VII ruled was a world away from the one that built the Great (Review) Pyramid of Giza. To her and her Roman contemporaries like Julius Caesar, the pyramids were already bafflingly ancient monuments. They had stood as silent relics of a distant and mysterious past for over two and a half millennia, their original purpose and construction methods already the subject of legend and speculation.

The time separating Cleopatra from the pyramid's construction is staggering—roughly 2,530 years. During this vast interval, entire civilizations like the Hittites and Assyrians rose and fell, the Bronze Age collapsed into the Iron Age, and the Greek language and culture that Cleopatra embraced came to dominate the Mediterranean. By contrast (Review), the span of time from Cleopatra’s death around 30 BC to the first Moon landing in 1969 AD is significantly shorter, at just under 2,000 years.

This surprising timeline recalibrates our sense of history. It reveals that the iconic Old Kingdom of the pyramid builders was as ancient to the last pharaoh of Egypt as the Roman Empire is to us today. Cleopatra's world, with its Hellenistic culture and Roman politics, was in many ways a bridge to the modern era, making her chronologically closer to astronauts walking on the Moon than to the pharaohs who first gazed upon the finished pyramids.