Thinkers Timeline

Herodotus (c.484-425 BCE) was an ancient Greek writer, born in Halicarnassus, a city on the southwestern coast of what is now Turkey. He lived during one of the most dramatic periods in the ancient world: the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. He is called the father of history, a title given to him by the Roman writer Cicero, because he was the first person we know of who systematically investigated the past through inquiry and travel rather than simply recording myths or royal chronicles. The word history itself comes from the Greek word he used in the opening of his work, historie, meaning inquiry or investigation. He travelled extensively across the known world, visiting Egypt, the Persian Empire, Scythia in what is now Ukraine and Russia, and many other places. He talked to people, visited sites of important events, collected stories, and tried to understand why things had happened. His great work, which we call The Histories, tells the story of the wars between Greece and Persia but ranges far beyond this into the customs, geography, and history of dozens of peoples. He died around 425 BCE, probably in the Greek colony of Thurii in southern Italy.

Epictetus (c.50-135 CE) was a Greek Stoic philosopher who was born into slavery in Hierapolis, a city in what is now Turkey. His name means acquired, or something like the purchased one, which reflects his status. He was owned by a freedman named Epaphroditus who worked in the imperial court of the Emperor Nero in Rome. Epictetus was permitted to study philosophy, and he became a student of the Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. He was eventually freed, probably after Nero's death, and established his own philosophical school first in Rome and later, after the Emperor Domitian expelled philosophers from Rome, in the city of Nicopolis in northwestern Greece. He was lame, probably as a result of mistreatment during his time in slavery, though ancient accounts of the specific circumstances differ. He left no writings himself: everything we have from him is in the notes taken by his student Arrian, who compiled them into two works, the Discourses and the shorter Enchiridion or Handbook. He had an enormous influence on later Stoic thinkers including Marcus Aurelius.

Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1136-1206) was an engineer, craftsman, inventor, and mathematician who served the Artuqid dynasty in Upper Mesopotamia, in what is now south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria. He was born in the region known as al-Jazira, from which he took his name, meaning the one from the island between the two rivers. He spent most of his working life at the court of the Artuqid rulers, first at Amid (modern Diyarbakir) and later at other centres. He served as the chief engineer of the palace, where he designed, built, and maintained machines for the court. In 1206, near the end of his life, he completed his great work, the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, commissioned by his patron the Artuqid king Nasir al-Din Mahmud. The book describes fifty machines in careful detail, with step-by-step drawings showing how each was constructed and how it worked. These included automated clocks, water-raising devices, fountains, hand-washing basins, musical automata, combination locks, and many others. He finished the book shortly before his death and it was copied and preserved for centuries in the Islamic world, with surviving manuscripts now held in libraries from Istanbul to Paris to Boston. Through these manuscripts, his engineering knowledge has reached the modern world.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. He was born in 1881 in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece), then a thriving Ottoman port. His birth name was simply Mustafa. He earned the additional name Kemal, meaning 'the perfect one', from a mathematics teacher at his secondary school. He was given the surname Atatürk, meaning 'Father of the Turks', by the Turkish parliament in 1934 when surnames became compulsory under his reforms. He was a career military officer in the late Ottoman army. He fought in Libya against Italy in 1911-1912 and in the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913. He became famous internationally for his successful defence of the Gallipoli peninsula against Allied forces in 1915 during the First World War. He was an Ottoman general by the war's end. When the Allies began partitioning the defeated Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal organised an armed nationalist resistance from Anatolia. He won the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) against Greek, Armenian, French, and British forces, in a war that also included the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Greeks, and other minorities from much of Anatolia. He abolished the Ottoman Sultanate in 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923, becoming its first president. From then until his death he led an extraordinary programme of reforms: the abolition of the caliphate, the secularisation of law and education, the replacement of Arabic script with Latin alphabet, women's suffrage, civil marriage and divorce, monogamy, and the comprehensive Westernisation of dress, names, and public life. He governed through a single-party state. He died at Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul on 10 November 1938 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 57.

Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, feminist political leader, soldier, and public intellectual. She is widely regarded as the founding mother of the modern Turkish novel and one of Turkey's most important twentieth-century writers. She was born in Istanbul in 1884 to an upper-class Ottoman family. Her father was a secretary to Sultan Abdülhamid II. The family was associated with the Dönmeh, a community of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who maintained some Sabbatean traditions privately. She was educated at home by tutors in Ottoman and European literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano, English, French, and Arabic, and briefly attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She began writing journalism and fiction in her early twenties. She divorced her first husband in 1910 when he took a second wife, an unusual act of defiance against polygamy in late Ottoman society. She married the politician and physician Adnan Adıvar in 1917. During the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) she became one of the movement's most powerful voices: she addressed the famous Sultanahmet rally in 1919 against Greek occupation, then went to Anatolia to join Mustafa Kemal's nationalist forces. She served as a corporal and later as a sergeant-major, working as a press officer and translator. She wrote about the war in The Turkish Ordeal. Her relationship with Mustafa Kemal soured after independence. As his single-party regime tightened, she and her husband went into exile in Britain and France in 1926. She did not return to Turkey for fourteen years. She wrote extensively in English during exile, including her two-volume Memoirs (1926, 1928). She returned to Turkey in 1939, served as the first woman professor at Istanbul University from 1940 to 1950, and was elected to the National Assembly from 1950 to 1954. She died in Istanbul on 9 January 1964.

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish citizen to receive the prize. He is widely regarded as one of the major living novelists in any language. His books have sold over thirteen million copies and have been translated into more than sixty languages. He was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 into a wealthy, Westernised family. His grandfather had made a fortune in railways under the early Republic. His father was an engineer who also had unrealised literary ambitions. Pamuk grew up in the upmarket Nişantaşı neighbourhood of Istanbul, surrounded by books and the lingering melancholy of a fallen Ottoman world. He planned to be a painter through his teens. Family pressure pushed him toward a more practical career, and he enrolled in architecture at Istanbul Technical University. After three years he dropped out and shifted to journalism at the University of Istanbul, graduating in 1977. He had decided he wanted to write novels. He spent the next eight years writing in his parents' apartment, supported by his family. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons), was published in 1982 and won several Turkish literary prizes. His international breakthrough came with The Black Book (1990) and especially My Name Is Red (1998), set among Ottoman miniaturist painters in 1591. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006. In 2005 he was prosecuted under Turkey's Article 301 for telling a Swiss newspaper that 'thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it'. The charges were eventually dropped on a technicality, but death threats forced him to live with security and to spend significant time abroad. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 2007 while continuing to live primarily in Istanbul.