No, this Imhotep is not the priest from The Mummy (1999).  Imhotep was an ancient Egyptian man who took a simple enough idea that had developed over the centuries and turned it up a notch to create what was then the world’s largest stone building.  He is forgotten by all but Egyptologists and amateur enthusiastic historians but in his own time and for centuries afterward, he was a legend as an architect and healer.  Eventually, he would become a god.

Background

Imhotep lived and came to prominence in the reign of Djoser, which happened circa 2650 B.C.  His origins are largely unknown but classical historians put his town of birth at Gebelein, which was south of ancient Thebes in Upper Egypt.  Still others put his birthplace at Ankhtow, a suburb of Memphis in the north (Lower Egypt).  So I think we can safely say that no one has any firm idea where this man came from.  What we do know is that Imhotep was born into a fascinating and complicated time.

This was the early period of ancient Egypt, before all the famous pharaohs like Ramses II and Tutankhamun.  No, those people lived in the 19th and 18th Dynasties respectively while Djoser is considered the first pharaoh of the Third Dynasty.  These people lived more than a thousand years apart and Egypt was not yet the powerhouse it would become in the New Kingdom.  Narmer had united Upper and Lower Egypt circa 2900 B. C. so the country was fairly new when you compare it to what it would eventually become: a three thousand year long relatively successful regional power.  The art compared to the Middle and New Kingdom art was basic and architecture was just in its infancy but Imhotep would help bring along a sort of renaissance that we would call the Pyramid age.  That’s still a little farther off in Egyptian history than we’ll cover today, however.

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