Who Was Imhotep ?

Photo by Hu Totya, distributed under a CC license.

If you asked someone in the late 90s who Imhotep was probably the majority of the people would have responded the evil mummy from the movie ‘The Mummy’. Some others might have tried their luck and said that Imhotep was an Egyptian god. Kinda close but in truth Imhotep became a deatified 2000 years after his passing.

Imhotep was real. He was one of the chief official of the Pharaoh Djoser. He has been credited for the first use of stone columns to support a building and also to inventing the method of stone dressing buildings. While all these firsts are already impressive in their own right probably the most impressive of them all is the achievement of building the first pyramid like structure in Egypt known as the step pyramid.

What Imhotep did was going beyond what was the traditional rectangular structure resting place for the pharoah called mastaba and build additional mastabas on top of each other in a step like formation, hence the step pyramid.

One would assume that Imhotep had his hands full with all these accomplishments. Amazingly enough he was not done yet. Imhotep was also a major figure in Ancient Egyptian medicine.

As mentioned before 2000 years after his death his status was raised to deity of medicine and healing.