It is baffling to consider that Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
The pyramid went up around 2560 BC and Cleopatra died in 30 BC, which means the pyramid was already about 2,500 years old in her lifetime while she sits roughly 2,000 years before us.
Ramses II reigned bang in the middle of those two points, around 3,200 years ago.
Last week, I went to the Ramses II exhibition at Battersea Power Station. It is well worth a trip for two reasons.
Standing in front of an array of 3,000 year old artefacts dazzles the brain. It is hard to fathom how such detailing has survived so well. Jewellery, clothing and sarcophagi sitting there as though they were finished last week.
The second reason is to learn about his propaganda machine, which was astonishing.
If there was a statue, his name was stamped on it. Buildings and stones across Egypt ended up covered in his name and stories of his preferred narrative. He chiselled out the cartouches of earlier pharaohs, Amenhotep III in particular, and replaced them with his own.
Because he built so many properties and carved stories into them, there were stories for everyone to tell about the great pharaoh.
He put his pictures everywhere and fathered more than 100 children.
He mastered the art of the personal brand, marketing and perception filtering over a reign of 60 years.
The truth was a secondary concern.
At the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC, Ramses II nearly lost his army to a Hittite ambush led by Muwatalli II and the engagement ended in stalemate. Yet he plastered the walls of Abu Simbel, Karnak and Luxor and the Ramesseum with monumental reliefs depicting himself single-handedly routing the Hittite forces.
It became one of the earliest and most effective state propaganda campaigns in history, so successful that the Egyptian version dominated the story for three thousand years until the Hittite tablets were rediscovered in the early twentieth century and finally revealed the other side.
The treaty that eventually settled the conflict, signed around 1259 BC between Ramses and Hattusili III, is often called the earliest surviving peace treaty, and a reproduction hangs at the UN headquarters in New York.
Ramses turned a stalemate into a foundational myth precisely because he controlled every surface a citizen could read. He owned distribution as well as story.
What struck me - and probably most people who have walked through the exhibition - was the subtle comparison to today's world leaders claiming premature war victories and working hard to control the narrative.
The narrative wins when you own where it lives, not just what it says.
So go to the exhibition, but do a little reading on his enemies before you do. You will see the same craftsmanship in the carvings either way. You will just know what the carvings were for.
Dan Ilett was a national technology and business news journalist (Financial Times, Economist Group, Daily Telegraph), before becoming a CEO himself and then an advisor on deals, storytelling and growth. He edits The Executive Summary and works with a small number of companies on growth, performance, organisational change and AI. His advisory has shaped $1bn in closed deals. He has worked with IBM, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Cognizant, Equinix, UK Government and SEB. Dan likes fishing, mountain biking and camping. And video games in the winter.