The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire.

Teaching at Oxford is recorded as far back as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world. The Aztec Empire, by contrast, wasn’t founded until 1428, when the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan formed the Triple Alliance — more than three centuries after Oxford’s earliest classes.

It’s a reminder that “ancient” and “old” are relative labels that depend entirely on what you’re comparing something to. Institutions we think of as quintessentially old-world Europe can predate entire civilizations we tend to file away in an equally distant, unrelated past.