Creator

Imhotep

jj-m-ḥtp

MedicineArchitectureWisdom

How it changed

A real person: the architect of Djoser's Step Pyramid, the first large stone building in the world, and named on a statue base of the king himself. Two thousand years after his death he was a god of medicine with temples of his own, where the sick slept in the hope of a curative dream. Almost nobody in Egypt made that journey from official to deity, and the length of the gap is the remarkable part.

Cult centre

Memphis and Saqqara

Best attested

Lived c. 2650 BCE; worshipped as a god from roughly the Late Period

Family

Given Ptah as a father once deified.

Epithets

“Son of Ptah”

How to recognise the figure

A seated man in a plain skullcap with an open papyrus roll across his knees.

Worshipped at

Inbu-hedj

now Mit Rahina, south of Cairo

The Memphite necropolis

now Saqqara

Others in this group

Thoth

Hermopolis

Amun

Thebes

Ptah

Memphis

Maat

Worshipped throughout Egypt rather than centred anywhere