Home / Trivia / History Firsts & Lasts
Cleopatra lived closer in time to which: the building of the Great Pyramid, or the Moon landing?
The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE, about 2,500 years before Cleopatra. The Moon landing came about 2,000 years after her.
Ancient history spans far more time than people tend to picture. Cleopatra VII, the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, died in 30 BCE. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu in the 26th century BCE, roughly 2,500 years earlier. The Apollo 11 landing took place in 1969 CE, about 2,000 years after her death, so the gap to the Moon landing is shorter by several centuries.
The reason is that Cleopatra belonged to the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by a Macedonian general of Alexander the Great after 323 BCE, so she lived in a Greek-speaking royal house in Hellenistic Egypt. Her world included Alexandria's great library and lighthouse, and her ally and rival was Rome; by her day the pyramids were already ancient monuments, older to her than Roman temples are to us.
A Smithsonian Magazine piece makes similar comparisons: it says Cleopatra reigned about 26 centuries after the Great Pyramid and about 13 centuries after Tutankhamun, and that she lived nearer to our time than to the pyramid's construction. The exact numbers shift by a few decades depending on how the Fourth Dynasty is dated, but no reasonable dating changes the conclusion.