Look a little closer
No one knows exactly when teaching first began at Oxford, since clear records don't survive, but historians estimate that some form of instruction was already taking place there by around 1096.
The Aztec Empire, by contrast, didn't truly begin until much later, around 1325, when the city of Tenochtitlan was founded in what is now Mexico City. In other words, Oxford had already started teaching more than 200 years before the Aztec Empire even came into being.
This comparison is often cited as a striking example of how the flow of history can defy our intuition. It's easy to think of Europe's ancient universities and the ancient civilizations of the Americas as belonging to completely different eras, but in reality their timelines often overlap or even reverse.
Oxford has continued to grow ever since, and today, more than 900 years later, it remains the oldest English-speaking university in the world.
