Imhotep

Imhotep was born in Memphis during the reign of Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty of Egypt, around 2667 BCE. He served as Djoser's chief vizier and chancellor — the highest administrative office below the pharaoh — and his accomplishments in that role were so far beyond any precedent that he was, three millennia after his death, the only commoner in the long Egyptian record to be deified.

His most enduring monument is the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, the first monumental stone structure in human history. Before Imhotep, Egyptian royal tombs were single-story rectangular mud-brick mastabas. The Step Pyramid stacked six mastabas of decreasing size in carved limestone — the inaugural pyramid, the architectural form that would define Egyptian civilization for two thousand years and remains the most recognizable monument-type in the world. Imhotep's complex at Saqqara contains the earliest known fluted columns in the architectural record.

He was also a physician, identified by the Egyptians as the founder of their medical tradition. The Edwin Smith Papyrus — the oldest known surgical text, dating from around 1600 BCE but copied from a much earlier original — contains anatomical knowledge and surgical procedures attributed to Imhotep's tradition. The papyrus describes forty-eight cases of trauma surgery in a rational, observational mode, without invocation of magic — the first known surgical record to do so.

By the Egyptian Late Period, more than two thousand years after his death, Imhotep was worshipped as a god of medicine and architecture. Statues of him as a seated scribe were placed in temples. The Greeks identified him with their Asclepius. Cleopatra prayed at his shrines.

He is honored here as the first individual in human history deified for scientific achievement.