It’s an interesting question. The great antiquity of the Earth wasn’t fully appreciated until ‘modern’ radiometric dating. As late as 1840 it was perfectly acceptable to believe the earth was a few thousand years old. But we now know that the great pyramids precede the Romans by mere moments in the large scale of time. In some ways the Romans were more ‘modern’ than present western culture.
I believe it was primarily geology rather than radiocarbon dating that began to revise the age of the earth.
At least some people back in antiquity believed in a very remote origin of Egyptian civilization—hundreds of thousands of years. St. Augustine talks about these people in his “City of God” and takes them to task for so credulously believing in “histories” that were clearly falsified.
Their parties were a lot more fun.
They obviously had better dating instruments than we.