It should be the least useful mononym possible, but its totally not. Its perfectly understood.
Also fun fact -- if you're a history nerd -- "Julius Caesar" is almost equally nonsensical to just "Caesar" since "Julius" is not his name, but refers to his family ("gens"). The first Caesar from that family, that we know of at least, was Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.
It wasn't (yet) a title during the lifetime of Gaius Julius Caesar, though...
> still kicking in Proto-West Germanic derivatives branching off "kaisar"
Like the non-Germanic Slavic "Tsar".
> Sextus Julius Caesar in around 200 BC, 300 years before Gaius Julius Caesar was born.
Did you accidentally swap the 200 and 300, or are you saying Julius was born ~100 AD?
The gory history of Europe’s mummy-eating fad https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
but people generally don't like to be reminded.
"The Western pop cultural canon of ancient Egypt" seems to be a red herring, though; Cleopatra is not part of or associated with ancient Egypt. She would be at the tail end of the Hellenistic period or the beginning of the Roman Empire. The New Kingdom ended a thousand years before she came to power.
(Hey, why do we call it "the New Kingdom"?)
Some people care, of course, and many are better informed today, but there's a body of "common knowledge" out there that just runs it all together in a melange of pyramids and funny walks.
18 years before XKCD, a 386-based PC capable of running Doom would have set you back $6,000–$10,000.
Imagine a game released today that has a 64-core CPU and a 4090 as minimum requirements, and that's roughly what Doom's system requirements would have looked like in 1987.
Within six months hobbyist computer enthusiasts were paying half that (or less, IIRC) for PC clones direct from asia.
Source: That's about what I paid for a Doom capable PC at the time.
A pair of second-generation T800 transputer chips and a 4-chip array board to fix them to cost way more at about the same time.
Let's see... the release of the film The Day After Tomorrow is closer to 'We begin bombing in five minutes' than it is to today.
* We are closer in time to the T rex than the T rex was to the Stegosaurus
* We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza