Incredible but true: This university is older than the Aztec Empire | Other historical facts that will blow your mind
Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about history. These surprising timelines will change how you see the past.
Time is a funny old concept. Does it really fly when we’re having fun? And why does it appear to go faster the older we get?
Whatever the answers to those questions may be, time certainly appears to be capable of playing tricks on the mind, which may be further emphasized by our perception of when historical events took place.
Looking back to the “old days,” it can be incredibly complicated to comprehend how close, or far apart, such events occurred in relation to one another.
This is how old the world’s oldest universities are
For instance, the University of Oxford, the world’s first English-speaking university, opened its doors to its first students in 1096. That said, that isn’t enough to make it the world’s oldest university, a title that belongs to the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, which was founded as a mosque in 859.
The fact that students over 1,000 years ago enrolled to study at Oxford in the same way as you can do now may be enough to boggle the mind of some. But what might be even more perplexing is that the Aztec Empire, which controlled most of central Mexico at its height and most likely feels emblematic of an earlier time, wasn’t established until 1428. By that point, teaching had been going on in Oxford for over 330 years.
Cleopatra and the Giza pyramids
Similarly, Cleopatra was the last active Hellenistic pharaoh in Ancient Egypt before it was annexed by Roman Empire in 30 BC. Although she is one of the best-known figures from that cradle of civilization, Cleopatra came approximately 2,500 years after the Giza Pyramids, today one of the world’s most visited sites, were built between 2600 and 2500 BC.
Meanwhile, time can also cause havoc when it comes to two things that occurred, or existed, at the same time.
McDonald’s bizarre connection to Auschwitz
The long-extinct woolly mammoth was still alive when the Egyptians were building those pyramids. And the world’s oldest living tree, a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains, California, was already 1,000 years old when the last woolly mammoth died.
The first Star Wars film was released in 1977, the same year as the last guillotine execution in France. Speaking of capital punishment, it was possible to take the London Underground to the last public hanging in the UK capital in 1868.
Finally, McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in San Bernardino, California just five days before the first prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
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