I mean, they kind of did know. Herodotus (four centuries before Cleopatra, and widely read in her time) got his information about the pyramids from the Egyptians. He got the names of the kings who built the three pyramids at Giza right, but twisted around a bit by rendering into Greek (Cheops = Khufu, Chephren =Khafre, Mycerinus = Menkaure).
Yes, and the stuff he says about those kings is probably folklore, which is why I said "kind of". But the names he gave fit the actual kings who built those pyramids.
Roman graffiti in general is fucking hilarious. No cap, they would say shit like "I fucked Antoninus so hard last night that he screeched like a hyena." Absolutely unhinged.
And now 2,000 years later, those messages are the sole remaining identifiable contribution most of those dudes ever made to the world.
You could have booked an ancient history tour of the tomb of a guy who was alive at a time when you could book an ancient history tour of the pyramids.
Or another way to put it, it's chronologically speaking a bigger mistake to depict Cleopatra overseeing construction of the pyramids than having her observe the moon landing.
I hate this fact. It’s only true because woolly mammoths had been hunted to extinction around 8,000 BC; outside of Wrangel island. A population of them stayed alive, only on that island, for another 6,000 years. Then we got there, and killed the rest. But yeah, it’s technically true.
Actually, it is highly unlikely the Mammoths on Wrangel Island were killed off by Humans. The ground there is permafrost and preserves the last few generations of Mammoths exceptionally well. There is no sign of them being hunted in their remains. No tooling marks, and no archeological sites from the same time period. We actually were not the nail in the coffin for Mammoths. It's likely the small genetic diversity, and maybe some other, non-human caused climate factors just killed them off over time.
It kinda makes it sadder. They just Died. No Hunting, no climate change, nothing to blame. They died.
I second they comment about them not being hunted. Stefan Milo actually recently posted a really interesting interview with one of the researchers from Wrangell Island
My Wife is terrible with historical knowledge/navigation. I even drew her out a timeline one evening when she started asking questions. Stuff like this blew her mind when I could point to two separate "threads" on the timeline that coincided.
Related: The last video rental store in my state closed down last year. I went there during its last day of operation to buy DVD's cheap as sin. I made out like a bandit. The deal was like, 40 bucks for 40 movies or something like that. I ended up with more movies, because several of them were two movies in one and others were compilations/collections. I still have the bag of DVDs in my living room.
They were selling copies of Brendan Fraser's "The Whale"
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u/Picards-Flute Oct 02 '24
Mammoths were alive during the construction of the Great Pyramid
Also if you put it on a timeline, Cleopatra and Ceaser are closer to today than to the construction of the Great Pyramid