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.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist, scientist, and inventor. He was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, in what is now Italy. His name means 'Leonardo from Vinci'. He was the son of a young woman named Caterina, who was probably a peasant or servant, and a wealthy notary named Ser Piero. His parents never married. Leonardo grew up in his father's family but was treated as a separate, somewhat outside figure. He showed great talent young. As a teenager he was apprenticed to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. He learned painting, sculpture, and many practical crafts. Around the age of 30, he moved to Milan to work for the Duke, Ludovico Sforza. He stayed in Milan for nearly 20 years. He painted, designed weapons, planned buildings, and filled notebooks with ideas. When French armies invaded Milan, Leonardo moved on. He worked in Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities. He served various rulers, including Cesare Borgia and the Medici. In 1516, the king of France, Francis I, invited him to come and live in France. Leonardo accepted. He spent his last three years in a small castle near the king's palace at Amboise. He died there in 1519, aged 67. He never married and had no children. He was probably gay, though the evidence is indirect. He was vegetarian, unusual for his time. He left thousands of notebook pages full of drawings and ideas, most of which were not read for centuries.

Sin Saimdang was a Korean artist, calligrapher, poet, and Confucian scholar of the mid-Joseon period. She is widely regarded as the most accomplished female artist of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) and one of the most celebrated women in Korean history. She has been the first woman depicted on a South Korean banknote (the 50,000 won note, issued from June 2009). Her real personal name was Sin In-seon. 'Saimdang' was her pen name, taken from Tairen, the mother of King Wen of Zhou in classical Chinese tradition; her name signalled her aspiration to be like that exemplary figure. Her other pen names included Saim, Inimdang, and Imsajae. She was born on 29 October 1504 (5 December by the Western calendar) in Bukpyeong-chon village, Jukheon-ri, Gangneung, Gangwon Province, at her maternal grandparents' home (Ojukheon, still preserved as a historic site). Her father was Sin Myeong-hwa, a government official and friend of the reformist scholar Jo Gwang-jo, who chose not to be politically active during the factional struggles of his time. Her mother was Lady Yi. She was the eldest of five sisters; her parents had no sons. Her maternal grandfather, recognising her early talent, taught her as he would have taught a grandson: classical Chinese, history, philosophy, and the Confucian canon. She also developed exceptional skill in calligraphy, embroidery, and painting from childhood. At nineteen she married Yi Won-su, a man from a respectable but poor family. Her father had specifically chosen Yi because he was willing to let her continue her artistic work. The marriage produced eight children, five sons and three daughters. Her third son was Yi I (1536-1584), pen name Yulgok, who would become one of the two greatest Neo-Confucian philosophers in Korean history. Saimdang continued painting and writing throughout her marriage. She died of sudden illness in Pyongan region on 17 May 1551 at age 47.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a German composer and organist usually regarded as the supreme master of Baroque music and one of the greatest composers in any tradition. He was born in Eisenach into a large and distinguished family of working musicians — the name Bach had become almost a synonym for musician in parts of central Germany. He was orphaned at ten and raised by an older brother who trained him in the organ and in composition. From fifteen he worked continuously as a professional musician: as a choirboy, as a church organist in small towns, as a court musician at Weimar and then Cothen, and from 1723 until his death as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where he was responsible for the music at several city churches, the Thomasschule, and important civic occasions. He wrote music almost constantly. His output includes more than two hundred sacred cantatas, the St Matthew and St John Passions, the B minor Mass, the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, dozens of organ works, and hundreds of other pieces. He married twice and had twenty children, several of whom became important composers in the following generation. He went blind in his last year and died after an unsuccessful eye operation. His music was not widely celebrated after his death and had slipped into relative obscurity by 1800; its revival in the nineteenth century, launched by Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion, began a long process by which Bach came to be regarded as a central figure of world music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer. He is one of the most celebrated composers in European classical music. He was born in 1756 in Salzburg, then a small city in the Holy Roman Empire. He died in 1791 in Vienna, aged only 35. Mozart was a child prodigy. He showed an astonishing musical gift very young. By the age of five he was composing simple pieces. His father, Leopold Mozart, was also a musician. Leopold took young Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna, also gifted, on long tours across Europe. They performed for kings, queens, and audiences in many cities. As an adult, Mozart settled in Vienna, the musical capital of his time. He worked as a freelance musician. He gave concerts, taught pupils, and wrote music on commission. This was a difficult way to live. Mozart often had money worries, even though his music was admired. In a short career he wrote an enormous amount: over 600 works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and church music. He died young, possibly of a fever or kidney illness. The exact cause is not known. He was buried in a common grave, in the standard way of his time. He was not poor or forgotten when he died, despite later myths.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese painter and printmaker of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest artist of the ukiyo-e tradition and one of the most influential artists in world history. He was born in the commoner district of Edo (modern Tokyo) to an artisan family. Apprenticed at fifteen to a woodblock cutter, he entered the studio of the print designer Katsukawa Shunsho at eighteen and spent his twenties learning the trade. He changed his artistic name over thirty times across his long career, each change marking a stylistic shift or a new artistic ambition. The name Hokusai, meaning north studio, dates from his middle years. He produced an enormous body of work: book illustrations, sketches, paintings, and the printed series for which he is most famous. In his early seventies he began the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji — two of the most widely recognised images in the world. He also produced the Hokusai Manga, fifteen volumes of drawings covering every conceivable subject, from birds and fish to grimacing faces and imaginary creatures. He lived in poverty for much of his life, moved house more than ninety times, and continued working into his late eighties. He died at eighty-eight, lamenting that he had not been given another ten years of life to become a true artist.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He was born in 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany. He is one of the most important composers in the history of Western music. He was baptised on 17 December, so he was probably born a day or two earlier. He came from a musical family. His grandfather was a respected court musician. His father, Johann, was also a musician but a difficult man and a heavy drinker. Johann saw young Ludwig's talent and pushed him hard, sometimes cruelly, hoping to create a child star like Mozart. Beethoven gave his first public performance at the age of seven. In 1792, aged 21, he moved to Vienna, the music capital of Europe. He studied briefly with Joseph Haydn. He soon became famous in Vienna, first as a pianist and then as a composer. Wealthy noble families paid him to write music. He never took a full court post. He preferred to work as a freelance composer, which was unusual for his time. In his late twenties, he began to lose his hearing. By his forties he was almost completely deaf. He kept composing, often using a notebook to communicate with visitors. His later works, including the Ninth Symphony, were written when he could no longer hear them properly performed. He never married, though he loved several women, often unhappily. He died in Vienna in 1827, aged 56. Around 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist usually credited as one of the pioneers of abstract painting in the European tradition. He was born in Moscow to a prosperous tea-trading family and spent his early childhood in the southern Russian port of Odessa. He studied law and economics at Moscow University and was preparing for an academic career when, at thirty, he decided to abandon it and become a painter. He moved to Munich in 1896 and trained at the city's art academy. Over the following decade he developed from a competent painter of folk-inflected landscapes into a theorist and practitioner of a new kind of painting that dispensed with recognisable subjects. In 1910 he painted what is often regarded as one of the earliest purely abstract works, a watercolour that broke decisively with representation. He co-founded the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, published his major theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art that same year, and played a central role in the artistic ferment of the years before the First World War. He returned to Russia during the war, worked in the cultural institutions of the early Soviet period, and came back to Germany in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944. He was married twice and had a long partnership with the painter Gabriele Münter during his Munich years.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter whose intensely personal and politically engaged work has made her one of the most widely recognised artists of the twentieth century. She was born in Coyoacan, then a village outside Mexico City, in the Blue House her parents had built and where she would live most of her life. Her father was a German-born photographer of Hungarian Jewish background; her mother was a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indigenous descent. Kahlo later changed her date of birth to 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, to align her life with the revolutionary era. She contracted polio at six, which left her right leg permanently weakened. At eighteen she was in a streetcar accident that broke her spine, pelvis, collarbone, and right leg; a metal rod pierced her body. She spent months in bed recovering and began painting seriously during this period, using a mirror mounted above her bed to paint self-portraits. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera, twenty years her senior; their tempestuous relationship, including divorce and remarriage, lasted until her death. She painted more than 140 works, about a third of them self-portraits. She had a single solo exhibition in Mexico during her lifetime, in 1953, when she was carried to the gallery in her hospital bed. She died in 1954 at forty-seven, with her diary reading: I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and editor whose thirty completed feature films include some of the most influential works in the history of cinema. He was born in Tokyo, the youngest of seven children in a family descended from samurai. His older brother Heigo, a narrator for silent films, took him to see European and American movies and introduced him to Western literature; Heigo's suicide in 1933 marked Kurosawa deeply. Kurosawa had initially wanted to be a painter and studied Western art before entering the film industry as an assistant director in 1936. He learned his craft under the veteran director Kajiro Yamamoto and directed his first film in 1943, during the Second World War. After the war he emerged as a major figure in the revival of Japanese cinema. His 1950 film Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, bringing Japanese cinema to wide international attention for the first time. Over the following four decades he directed Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Ikiru, High and Low, Ran, and many other films, adapting Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Japanese sources, and producing original works set in both historical and contemporary Japan. He faced career setbacks in the 1970s, including a suicide attempt in 1971, but continued working into his late eighties. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1990 and died in 1998 at eighty-eight.

Ravi Shankar was an Indian musician. He played the sitar, a long-necked string instrument from northern India. He is the most famous Indian classical musician of the 20th century. He was born in 1920 in the city of Varanasi (also called Banaras), in northern India. He came from a Bengali Brahmin family. His father was a lawyer and scholar who left the family when Ravi was young. His older brother Uday Shankar was a famous dancer who toured the world with an Indian dance company. As a boy, Ravi joined his brother's troupe. He travelled across Europe and America as a young dancer and musician. He met many Western artists in this period. At 18, he made a serious decision. He left his brother's company and went to study music seriously with a great teacher named Allauddin Khan in central India. He spent seven years in Khan's home, training intensively in the strict Indian classical tradition. This kind of long apprenticeship was traditional. The teacher was almost a parent. Ravi later married Khan's daughter, Annapurna Devi, who was also a brilliant musician. From the 1950s onwards, his career grew rapidly. He performed across India, then in Europe and America. In the 1960s he became famous in the West, partly because of his friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles. He continued performing into his nineties. He had a complex personal life, with several partners and four children, including the musicians Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. He died in San Diego in 2012, aged 92.

Nina Simone was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter. Her real name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She was born in 1933 in the small town of Tryon, North Carolina, in the southern United States. She was the sixth of eight children in a poor Black family. She was a gifted musician from very early childhood. She could play piano by ear before she was three. She started playing in church and quickly showed serious talent. White and Black neighbours raised money to pay for her piano lessons. Her dream was to become the first major Black classical concert pianist in America. She studied for a year at the Juilliard School in New York. She then applied to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She was rejected. She always believed the rejection was because of her race. The disappointment shaped her life. To make money, she began singing and playing in nightclubs. She took the stage name Nina Simone partly so her religious mother would not know what she was doing. Her first album came out in 1958. By the early 1960s she was famous. She mixed jazz, classical, blues, gospel, folk, and African music. As the civil rights movement grew, she became one of its most powerful musical voices. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she grew more bitter and politically angry. She left the United States in the 1970s and lived in many countries. She struggled with mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, throughout her later life. She died in France in 2003.

Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician, bandleader, and political activist. He was born in 1938 in Abeokuta, a city in southwest Nigeria. He died in 1997 in Lagos. He is widely seen as one of the most important African musicians of the twentieth century. Fela came from a famous family. His mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was a leading Nigerian feminist and anti-colonial activist. His father was a school principal and a Christian minister. The family was middle class and well educated. As a young man, Fela studied music in London at Trinity College of Music. He returned to Nigeria and toured in the United States in 1969. There he met Black Panther activists, who influenced his political thinking. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he created a new style of music called Afrobeat. Afrobeat blends West African rhythms, especially Yoruba, with American jazz and funk. The songs are often very long, ten or fifteen minutes or more, with heavy horns and a steady, driving groove. Fela used Afrobeat to attack corruption, military rule, and the lasting effects of colonialism. The Nigerian government repeatedly tried to silence him. He was arrested many times. In 1977 soldiers attacked his home and beat him severely. He kept making music until shortly before his death from AIDS-related illness.

Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect. She was one of the most important architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, the highest honour in architecture, in 2004. Her buildings are known for bold curves, dramatic angles, and shapes that look impossible to build. She was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She came from a wealthy and progressive Iraqi family. Her father was a politician and businessman. Her mother was an artist. Iraq in the 1950s was modernising rapidly. Zaha grew up surrounded by modern art and modern architecture. She attended a Catholic school in Baghdad and a boarding school in England. She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, before turning to architecture. In 1972 she moved to London to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, one of the most experimental architecture schools in the world. She graduated in 1977. She worked briefly with her former teachers Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at OMA. In 1980 she founded her own practice, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London. For her first 15 years, almost none of her designs were built. Her drawings won prizes and inspired other architects, but clients found her buildings too radical to commission. Her breakthrough came with the Vitra Fire Station in Germany, completed in 1993. From then on, her practice grew. By her death she had designed buildings on every inhabited continent. She died suddenly in 2016, aged 65, of a heart attack while being treated for bronchitis in Miami. Her practice continues without her. Her partner Patrik Schumacher has led it since her death. Her best-known buildings include the Aquatics Centre at the 2012 London Olympics and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan.