MargenWe tend to pile ancient Egypt into a single drawer, as if Cleopatra had watched the pyramids go up. That is not how it was, not by a long way.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around the year 2560 before our era. Cleopatra was born in 69 before our era. Some two thousand five hundred years lie between the pyramid and the queen. Between Cleopatra and us there are barely more than two thousand.
Put another way: Cleopatra is closer in time to the launch of the first iPhone, in 2007, than to the building of the Great Pyramid. To her, those monuments were already thousand-year-old antiquities, as remote as the Romans are to us.
The past is not one single block. It has a past of its own, and sometimes it is dizzyingly deep.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica