Cleopatra lived closer to the Apollo 11 Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The maths is straightforward.
Cleopatra lived approximately 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was completed.
She lived approximately 2,000 years before humans walked on the Moon.
Which means Cleopatra was, in terms of chronology, around 500 years closer to us than to them.
But the fact feels wrong.
Profoundly, emotionally wrong.
The pyramids feel ancient.
Cleopatra feels ancient.
The brain strongly objects to discovering they are not the same ancient.
Most people mentally compress enormous stretches of history into one vaguely gold-coloured blur where:
- pyramids,
- Cleopatra,
- hieroglyphics,
- Romans,
- mummies,
- and Brendan Fraser
all appear to coexist simultaneously.
This malfunction of perception is because oddly, the brain does not experience time chronologically.
It experiences it in categories.
“Ancient” is not a measurement.
It is a filing system.
Everything beyond a certain perceptual threshold collapses into the same undifferentiated folder marked:
long ago.
Which is also why the 1980s will permanently remain “about twenty years ago” for some of us.
The brain basically stops counting once time stops feeling immediate.
Even people living through enormous transitions rarely experience themselves as historical figures.
Mostly they experience:
- weather,
- groceries,
- meetings,
- and whatever fresh hell he tweeted overnight.
The Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean world for roughly 500 years.
The British Empire remained the dominant global power for perhaps half that.
The United States has not yet reached its first century as the post-war superpower, at the time of writing.
And yet every civilisation quietly experiences itself as:
- normal,
- inevitable,
- and structurally permanent.
The Romans did.
The British still do, bless them.
We do too.
And history keeps responding: adorable.
But the distance we casually compress into “history” contains entire worlds that once considered themselves the centre of civilisation before quietly becoming chapters in someone else’s textbook.
Two thousand years from now, somebody will look back at us the way we look back at Cleopatra.
Not as the recent past but as ancient history, and they will conflate our existence with other long dead civilisations.
The folder marked long ago is patient.
It has room for all of us.
Anyway.
Time for my milk bath.