The Architect Who Was Made a God

Imhotep is one of the very few non-royal Egyptians to be raised, over centuries, to the status of a full god, a trajectory that makes him a rare window into how divinity was conferred in Egyptian religion. In life, in the twenty-seventh century BCE, he was chief minister to the pharaoh Djoser and the architect credited with the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first monumental structure built entirely of dressed stone and the ancestor of all later pyramids. His reputation as a sage and healer grew after his death; by the Late Period he was worshipped as a god of medicine and wisdom, given a divine parentage (son of the craftsman-god Ptah), and his temples became places where the sick sought cures through dream-incubation. The Greeks identified him with their own healing god Asclepius. The deification of a commoner, purely on the strength of remembered genius, is almost unique in the ancient world, and it made Imhotep the enduring Egyptian patron of architecture, learning, and medicine.