Ancient Egypt

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Almost everything vivid about Cleopatra, her wit, her languages, her death, comes from Roman writers who had reason to make her either glamorous or monstrous, and rarely both at once.

More than double the number Egypt built, these pyramids survived a nineteenth-century treasure hunter who demolished forty of them from the top down searching for gold.

The popular story that he vengefully erased his stepmother's monuments out of long-buried resentment turns out, once the dating is checked, to point to his son instead.