Historical dates that sound wrong but are right
Most people carry a rough timeline of history in their heads, and it is usually squashed. Anything labelled “ancient” gets filed in one pile, and anything from a distant continent gets filed as older than it is. A few well-documented pairs of dates show how far off that mental timeline can be.
Each pair below is checked against the standard dates. Where historians give a range, the post uses the usual figure and says so.
Cleopatra and the pyramids
Cleopatra, the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, died in 30 BC. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2560 BC. The Moon landing was in 1969.
Counting from 30 BC to AD 1969 gives about 2,000 years, allowing for the fact that there was no year zero. Counting from 2560 BC to 30 BC gives about 2,530 years. So Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. The pyramids were already ancient monuments in Cleopatra’s day, and further in the past for Cleopatra than Cleopatra is for us.
The surprise comes from treating “ancient Egypt” as one period. It lasted about three thousand years, which is longer than the time between Cleopatra and today.
Oxford and the Aztecs
The University of Oxford has no founding date, but there was teaching there by 1096. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that stood where Mexico City is now, was founded in about 1325. So Oxford is more than two centuries older than the city at the centre of the Aztec world.
This one catches people because the Aztecs feel as though they belong with the ancient civilisations, and a university feels modern. In fact the Aztec state was at its height in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when Oxford had already been teaching for hundreds of years.
Mammoths, pyramids and dinosaurs
Woolly mammoths mostly died out at the end of the last ice age, but a small population survived on Wrangel Island, off the north coast of Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. The Great Pyramid is roughly 4,500 years old. For several centuries, pyramids stood in Egypt while mammoths were still alive on that island.
The same squashing happens on a much larger scale with dinosaurs. Stegosaurus lived around 150 million years ago. Tyrannosaurus rex lived at the very end of the age of dinosaurs, until about 66 million years ago. The gap between the two is more than 80 million years, which is longer than the 66 million years between Tyrannosaurus and us. Seeing the two side by side in a book or a museum hides a gap that size completely.
Why the order feels wrong
The pairs that surprise people have something in common. We tend to remember events by their category, such as ancient, medieval or prehistoric, and assume that everything in one category happened at about the same time. We also tend to think of places by the era we learned about them in, so a civilisation met in a chapter about conquest gets placed further back than it belongs.
The opposite trick works too. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, 12 February 1809. One is usually filed under American politics and the other under science, so it rarely occurs to anybody that they were exact contemporaries.
If you want to get better at ordering events, the most useful habit is to anchor them. Learn a handful of dates you are sure of, one or two per century, and place everything else relative to them rather than relative to a vague sense of how old it feels. Before and after something you know is a much easier question than a date on its own.
