Science
flourished c. 27th century BCE, Memphis and Saqqara, Egypt
The official credited with the first pyramid in stone, whose memory outgrew his titles over two thousand years to become a sage and a god of healing.
Start learning Imhotep →The leap from mudbrick tomb to a man-made mountain of dressed stone at Saqqara - the first monumental stone building in history, and the engineering problem it solved. Imhotep is credited as its architect, and here the…
How do we know a man who left no writings actually existed? For Imhotep the answer is a single contemporary object: the base of a statue of King Djoser, on which a non-royal official’s name and titles were carved…
The offices Imhotep held made him the living image of an Egyptian ideal: the wise scribe-official who serves the king and masters knowledge. From that root grew his fame as a sage - and the belief that he authored a fam…
Imhotep is one of very few non-royal Egyptians ever to become a full god. But the transformation was slow and late: only around the Late and Ptolemaic periods, some two thousand years after he lived, was he worshipped a…
Imhotep is popularly called the ‘father of medicine’ and is often said to have written the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. This lesson teaches the real, rational Egyptian medical tradition the Edwin Smith Papy…
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