ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #010 | Did You Know? | April 2026

When you picture Cleopatra, the pyramids are usually right behind her. They shouldn’t be. To her, the pyramids were already ancient ruins — older than the entire history of Rome is to us today.

BY THE NUMBERS

Most people picture ancient Egypt as one continuous era — a single mental image of pyramids, pharaohs, hieroglyphs, and Cleopatra all happening together in some dusty, distant past.

That mental image is off by thousands of years.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2,560 BCE, during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu in the Fourth Dynasty. Cleopatra VII — the famous one, the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom — died in 30 BCE.

That’s a gap of approximately 2,530 years between the pyramid and Cleopatra.

The iPhone was released in 2007. That’s only 2,037 years after Cleopatra’s death.

Try to imagine what the pyramids meant to Cleopatra herself.

To her, they were ancient. Older to her than the Roman Empire is to us. Older than the entire English language. Older than the existence of the country called France. Older than Christianity, Islam, and most of Buddhism.

When she walked past them, she was looking at monuments that had been weathering in the desert for over 2,500 years before she was born. They were already half-buried in sand. Their original smooth white limestone casing had been falling off for centuries. Tourists had been carving graffiti into them since long before she was alive.

There are two reasons our brains compress all of Egyptian history into one era.

First, the visual signature is the same. Pyramids, hieroglyphs, headdresses, mummification — these traditions persisted for over 3,000 years across many dynasties. Cleopatra and Khufu both wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. They both wrote in hieroglyphs. They both worshipped versions of the same gods.

Second, our school education tends to lump it all together. Egyptian civilisation gets one or two chapters, and inside those chapters everything gets mixed up. Pyramids, Tutankhamun, Cleopatra — they all blur into one continuous past.

But ancient Egypt is not one era. It’s a civilization that lasted longer than the entire history of Christianity, the entire history of the United States, and the entire history of the English language combined.

Once you start playing with historical timelines, the surprises don’t stop.

Oxford University was already 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded in 1428. When the Spanish “discovered” the Aztecs in 1519, Oxford had already been producing graduates for over 400 years.

Harvard University was founded in 1636. The last woolly mammoths on Earth — a small isolated population on Wrangel Island in the Arctic — went extinct around 1650 BCE. There were mammoths walking around when the pyramids were being built.

Nintendo was founded in 1889. That’s before the construction of the Eiffel Tower was completed (March 1889). Nintendo is older than the Eiffel Tower.

Cleopatra. The pyramids. The iPhone. Three things that should belong to three different eras.

And yet two of them are closer to each other than the other two.

History is older, weirder, and more lopsided than you ever realised.

SOURCES

Encyclopaedia Britannica — Great Pyramid of Giza

Smithsonian Magazine — “When Was the Great Pyramid Built?”

History Extra (BBC) — “Cleopatra: What Do We Really Know?”

Apple Press Release — iPhone launch (January 9, 2007)

Vartanyan, S. et al. — “Radiocarbon dating evidence for mammoths on Wrangel Island”, Radiocarbon (1995)