They’re even older than I am.

A few days ago, one of my sons surprised me with an unexpected fact — a fact that’s obviously true, when you think about it.

“Did you realize,” he suddenly said, “that Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the cell phone than to the construction of the pyramids?”

He’s undeniably correct.

Motorola demonstrated the first handheld cellular mobile phone in 1973.  It weighed nearly 4.5 pounds.  The first commercial cellular network was launched in 1979, in Japan.  And the rest is (little-known) history.

Cleopatra lived from 69 BC to 30 BC, which puts her about two thousand years from the mobile phone.

That’s a long time.  And Cleopatra VII Philopator (Κλεοπᾰ́τρᾱ Φιλοπάτωρ), to give her her proper name and to distinguish her from all of the other Cleopatras, was a ruler of ancient Egypt.  How, then, can it possibly be the case that she’s closer in time to iPhones than to the pyramids?

Well, the numbers don’t lie.

The Great Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu at Giza was completed in roughly 2560 BC, after twenty years of intense labor.  That’s almost precisely twenty-five centuries — two thousand five hundred years — before Cleopatra’s birth.  And the first of the pyramids, Djoser’s famous “Step Pyramid” at Saqqara, to the south of Giza, was built somewhat more than a century before the Great Pyramid.

What this should bring home is the astonishing antiquity of the pyramids.

By the time of Moses, they were already a thousand years old.

They go back further in time from Jesus than Jesus is from us.

Growing up in southern California, I saw the San Gabriel Mission — the Misión de San Gabriel Arcángel — nearly every day of my life.  It was founded in 1771.  In 1781, a group of settlers known as Los Pobladores gathered at the San Gabriel Mission and then went out to found El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, ‘The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels’.”

That seemed really, really old to me when I was a young boy.

When I served my mission in Switzerland, though — especially in places like the Berner Oberland — I often visited people who were living in chalets inscribed with dates from the 1600s and even, occasionally, from the 1500s.

But then I moved with my new wife to Egypt.  I saw the Great Pyramid of Giza almost every day.  And when I came back through Switzerland thereafter, AD 1500 didn’t seem quite so old any more.

To get much older than pyramids, you pretty much have to go geological or cosmological.