Imhotep, whose name means the one who comes in peace, lived in the 27th century BC during Egypt’s Third Dynasty. He was chancellor to King Djoser, high priest of Ra at Heliopolis, and the architect of Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, credited with the first known use of stone columns at a time when kings were buried under flat mud brick mastabas. Two inscriptions from his own era prove he existed: his name and titles on the base of a statue of Djoser, and graffiti on the enclosure wall of the unfinished pyramid of Djoser’s successor Sekhemkhet. One title, unique in Egyptian history and read as the two brothers, has led some scholars to suggest he was Djoser’s twin.

After his death his name disappears for about 1,200 years, resurfacing in the reign of Amenhotep III in an inscription telling priests to offer him the last drops of water from a ritual bowl. Scribes had kept his memory alive by pouring water from their ink pots in his honor. Healing powers only appear in the 30th Dynasty, over two thousand years after he lived, when he was merged with Thoth and later equated by the Greeks with Asclepius. There is no evidence he practiced medicine, yet the earliest written cancer diagnosis, whose treatment reads there is none, is often credited to him. His tomb has never been found.

• The statue of Djoser that puts a non-royal official’s name beside the king’s
• How a grassroots tradition among scribes slowly turned an architect into a demigod of writing and wisdom
• Why later physicians attached his name to texts like the Edwin Smith Papyrus to give them authority
• The Famine Stela story of a seven-year drought ended after he consults the Nile god Khnum
• A second century AD papyrus that makes Ptah his father and pits him against an Assyrian sorceress in a magic duel