Everything old feels the same age.
It isn’t. Start with the one almost everybody gets backwards.
Cleopatra lived closer to which?
last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt
Almost everybody says that.
It is the other way round, by nearly five hundred years.
Right, and almost nobody says that.
Most people pick the pyramid. It is not close.
Why nobody gets it
You judge how long ago something was by how much of it you can name. We know the last two thousand years in detail and everything before them as one word: ancient. So the deep past collapses, and things three thousand years apart land in the same place.
As it is, the last 2,000 years are a sixth of the line
As it feels, they are two thirds of it
It has a name: the telescoping effect. Drawn to scale, it stops being a matter of opinion. The long version is here.
What this is
One a day. Two things you have heard of, and a third to put between them.
No account, ever. Your guesses stay on your own device. Nothing you do here is tied to you.
Every date is sourced. Dates come from Wikidata, and every page says where each one came from.
Takes about twenty seconds. There will be another tomorrow.