Thinkers Timeline

Imhotep was an ancient Egyptian architect, doctor, and high official. He lived around 2,650 BCE, more than 4,500 years ago. This makes him one of the earliest individuals in history whose name and work we still know. He served the pharaoh Djoser, third king of Egypt's Third Dynasty. Most of what we know about him comes from later inscriptions and traditions. He was probably born to ordinary parents, not from the royal family. He rose through his own talent. He held many titles at Djoser's court. Inscriptions from his time call him chancellor, high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis, and chief carpenter and sculptor. He may also have served as the king's chief doctor. He was clearly one of the most important people in the kingdom, second only to the pharaoh himself. His greatest known work is the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. It was built as a tomb for Djoser. Before this pyramid, Egyptian kings were buried in flat-topped mud-brick tombs called mastabas. Imhotep stacked six mastabas of decreasing size on top of each other and built them in stone, not mud. The result was the world's first large stone building. It still stands today. After his death, Imhotep's reputation grew over the centuries. By around 500 BCE, more than 2,000 years after his life, he was being worshipped as a god of medicine and wisdom. The Greeks later identified him with their own healing god Asclepius. His tomb has never been found.

Euclid was a Greek mathematician who lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, around 300 BCE. He is sometimes called the 'father of geometry'. We know almost nothing about his personal life. We do not know where he was born, who his parents were, or when exactly he died. We are not even certain he was a single person. Some scholars have wondered whether 'Euclid' might be a name used by a group of mathematicians. What we do know is that he worked at the Library and Museum of Alexandria. This was the great centre of learning in the ancient world, founded by the kings of Egypt after Alexander the Great. Scholars from across the Greek world gathered there. Euclid taught and wrote in this setting. His great work is called the Elements. It is a textbook of geometry and number theory in 13 books. The Elements gathered together the mathematical work of earlier Greek thinkers like Pythagoras, Eudoxus, and Theaetetus. It also added Euclid's own arrangement and proofs. The Elements was used as the main geometry textbook for over 2,000 years. Until the late 19th century, almost every educated person in Europe and the Middle East had studied it. It was translated into Arabic, Latin, English, and many other languages. It is one of the most printed and studied books in human history, after only the Bible. Euclid himself remains a quiet mystery behind his enormous influence.

Origen was an early Christian scholar and teacher. He was born around 184 CE in Alexandria, in Roman Egypt, and died around 253 CE. He is one of the most important thinkers of the early Church, and also one of the most argued about. He grew up in a Christian family during a time when Christians were sometimes persecuted by the Roman state. When Origen was a teenager, his father was killed for his faith. Origen wanted to die with him but was stopped. This early loss shaped his whole life. He became a serious, hard-working, and intense person. While still young, he began teaching Christian students in Alexandria. He read widely, including Greek philosophy and the work of the Jewish thinker Philo, who had lived in the same city long before. Origen wrote a huge amount: commentaries on the Bible, defences of the faith, and works of theology. Later he moved to the city of Caesarea, where he set up a school. During a wave of persecution under the emperor Decius, around 250 CE, Origen was arrested and tortured. He did not give up his faith. He survived the prison but his body was broken by the treatment, and he died a few years later. The Church never officially named him a saint, partly because some of his ideas were later judged to be mistaken.

Hypatia of Alexandria (c.350-415 CE) was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who taught in the Egyptian city of Alexandria during the late Roman Empire. She was the daughter of the mathematician Theon, a scholar connected to the great library of Alexandria, and she received an exceptional education in the mathematical and philosophical traditions of the Greek-speaking world. By her maturity she was a renowned teacher in the Neoplatonist tradition, giving public lectures and leading a private circle of students that included Christians, pagans, and members of the wealthy families of the eastern Roman Empire. She is known to have written commentaries on the great mathematical texts of her time, including Diophantus's Arithmetica, Apollonius's Conics, and Ptolemy's Almagest, and to have worked closely with her father on the preservation and editing of earlier mathematical works. Her own writings do not survive; we know her through letters from her students, particularly Synesius of Cyrene, who became a Christian bishop but continued to honour her as his intellectual guide. Alexandria in her lifetime was politically and religiously turbulent. In 415 CE she was killed by a Christian mob in the streets of the city, in circumstances that have been debated by historians ever since. Her death has been remembered for sixteen centuries as a marker of something lost.

Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher who lived in Egypt. He was born around 20 BCE and died around 50 CE. Alexandria, his home city, was one of the largest and most learned cities in the ancient world. It had a big Jewish community and also a famous tradition of Greek philosophy. Philo lived in both of these worlds at once. He came from a wealthy and important Jewish family. His brother was one of the richest men in the city. Philo had a full Greek education. He read Plato, the Stoics, and other Greek thinkers closely. But he was also a devout Jew who knew the Hebrew scriptures well. He spent his life trying to bring these two traditions together. Most of what Philo wrote was about the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah. He read them mostly in Greek, in a translation called the Septuagint. He wrote long commentaries explaining their deeper meaning. We know one firm fact about his life. In the year 39 or 40 CE, he led a Jewish group from Alexandria to Rome. They went to ask the emperor Caligula to protect the Jews after violent attacks in their city. Philo wrote about this dangerous mission himself. The year of his death is not known exactly, but it was probably soon after.