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.

Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), a religious figure known in Hebrew as Rambam and in Arabic as Musa ibn Maymun, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician whose work shaped Jewish thought for centuries and influenced Christian and Islamic philosophy as well. He was born in Córdoba, in the part of al-Andalus then under Almoravid rule, where the great intellectual flowering of Jewish and Islamic civilisation was at its height. His father was a rabbinic judge. When Maimonides was about ten years old, the city fell to the Almohads, a Berber dynasty whose rulers offered non-Muslims the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The family was forced into a decade of wandering through Spain and North Africa before settling in Fustat, near Cairo, around 1166. There Maimonides rose to become the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and physician to the court of Saladin. He wrote in Arabic (using Hebrew letters) and in Hebrew. His three major works changed Jewish intellectual life permanently. The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168, in Arabic) made rabbinic law accessible to wider audiences and included his famous Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Mishneh Torah (1170-1180, in Hebrew), his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, organised the entire body of talmudic tradition into a single systematic presentation. The Guide for the Perplexed (completed around 1190, in Arabic) addressed those caught between traditional faith and Aristotelian philosophy, offering a sophisticated synthesis that remains one of the great works of medieval philosophy. He died in Fustat in 1204; tradition holds that his body was carried to Tiberias in the Galilee for burial, where his tomb is still visited. His influence on subsequent Jewish thought is difficult to overstate; the phrase from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses reflects the esteem in which later generations held him.

Umm Kulthum was an Egyptian singer. She was probably the most famous Arab cultural figure of the 20th century. She was born around 1898 in a small village called Tamay az-Zahayra, in the Egyptian Nile Delta. Her exact date of birth is uncertain, partly because village births were not always carefully recorded. Her father was a village imam, a Muslim religious leader. He led prayers and sometimes sang religious songs at weddings to earn extra money. He noticed that his young daughter had an extraordinary voice. He taught her to sing religious songs and then took her with him to perform. To make this socially acceptable in conservative villages, she dressed as a boy when she sang in public. She was known as 'the boy with the strong voice'. In the 1920s she moved to Cairo, the capital and cultural centre of Egypt. She took singing lessons, dropped the boy disguise, and quickly became a star. Egyptian radio began broadcasting her concerts in the 1930s. By the 1940s she was the most famous singer in the Arab world. She gave a concert on the first Thursday of every month for decades. Across the Arab world, streets emptied as people gathered around radios to listen. She sang for kings, presidents, and ordinary villagers. She supported Egyptian independence and President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Egypt lost the 1967 war with Israel, she gave concerts across the Arab world to raise money for the country. She died in 1975. Around four million people attended her funeral in Cairo, one of the largest in human history.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.