Which Came First?

Yes, by more than five hundred years. The Great Pyramid was finished around 2560 BC and Cleopatra died in 30 BC, a gap of about 2,530 years. Apollo 11 landed in 1969, 1,998 years after her death. To Cleopatra the pyramids were already ancient monuments, and Greek visitors such as Herodotus had been writing about them as tourist sights for four centuries.

Long enough that its own history had a history. Tutankhamun was buried around 1323 BC, some 1,240 years after the Great Pyramid was finished, and Cleopatra died about 1,290 years after Tutankhamun. Each of those gaps is about as long as the time from Charlemagne to today, and all of it sits under the one word ancient.

A third of every round comes from a short list of pairs picked by hand because most people get them wrong. The rest are drawn at random from the full list of events, with one rule: the two events have to be between 20 and 250 years apart. Any closer and it comes down to a lucky guess; any further apart and almost everyone gets it. No event appears twice in the same round, and which side the earlier one sits on is a coin flip.

Because nobody wrote the date down at the time. The year the Great Pyramid was finished, when the last mammoths died out and when Machu Picchu was built are scholarly estimates, and a few more, such as the founding of Rome, are traditional dates worked out by ancient writers centuries later. Those events are only paired with something at least fifty years away, so a question never depends on which estimate you have read. The one exception is the first Olympics against the founding of Rome, where both dates come from the same ancient tradition and the answer says so.

The wording says. A building is either begun or completed, an invention is patented or first demonstrated, a war begins, a book is published. Where an event stretched over a long time, the text names the moment the date belongs to, so there is one right answer. If the wording leaves room for two different years, the event does not go on the list.

Because there is no year zero. The calendar goes straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so any span that crosses that line is one year shorter than the subtraction suggests. The game counts it that way when it tells you how far apart two events were, which is why Cleopatra's death and the opening of the Colosseum come out as 109 years.

Yes, and it is the same trick the game plays on a bigger scale. Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago and was extinct long before Tyrannosaurus appeared, around 68 million years ago. That makes the gap between the two dinosaurs larger than the gap between Tyrannosaurus and us. The word dinosaur makes them feel like neighbours, the way the word ancient makes the pyramids and Cleopatra feel like one period.