the.com/ancient
old enough that even history forgot when it started taking notes.
means So old it belongs to a distant past, long predating living memory or written record.
from From Latin 'ante,' meaning 'before,' which gave rise to 'antianus' in late spoken Latin — roughly 'belonging to before-times.' This passed into Old French as 'ancien' and arrived in English in the 1300s. The stray '-t' on the end is an English afterthought, added much later by speakers who apparently felt 'ancien' wasn't quite finished yet — the same impulse that turned 'pesant' into 'pheasant' and 'tirant' into 'tyrant.'
- older than rings
- Bristlecone pines outlive entire civilizations, topping 4,800 years
- living relic
- Sharks predate trees by 100 million years
- word's roots
- From Latin ante, meaning simply before
- deep clocks
- Some glacial ice is 800,000 years old
- oldest light
- Stars we see may have died millennia ago
great pyramid of giza — 2,560 bce egyptian tomb, last standing wonder of the ancient world
colosseum — 72 ce roman amphitheater in rome, largest standing structure from classical antiquity
angkor wat — 12th-century khmer temple in cambodia, largest religious monument in the world