Did Cleopatra live closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids?

Yes. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2600 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC. That is a gap of roughly 2,570 years. Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969, just under 2,000 years after her death. So Cleopatra sits closer in time to astronauts walking on the Moon than to the workers who stacked Khufu's pyramid.

We tend to squash "ancient Egypt" into one picture: pharaohs, pyramids and Cleopatra all at once. But Egypt's history is so long that its own later people were tourists in its past. Cleopatra was not even from the pyramid builders' family. She descended from Ptolemy I, a Macedonian Greek general who served Alexander the Great, and her first language was Greek. She was the only ruler of her dynasty known to have bothered learning Egyptian.

In her lifetime the pyramid was already a sightseeing wonder. The Greek historian Diodorus visited Egypt around 60 to 56 BC, when Cleopatra was a child, and found its smooth outer casing still in excellent condition. Four centuries earlier, Herodotus had written about it more than 2,000 years after it was built, relying on priests, interpreters and locals.

After Cleopatra's death, Egypt became a Roman province. The pyramid, meanwhile, stayed the tallest human-made structure on Earth for more than 3,700 years. To Cleopatra, it was already ancient history.