Now as Well as Then: Imhotep revisited

I MENTIONED Imhotep in a previous article, but a conversation I had with two young medical doctors made me feel as though there was too little in the way of information about the great man not to revisit his life and achievement. They had been taught that Hippocrates was the father of medicine. Imhotep was easily the greatest man who ever lived. The description of him as Da Vinci, Galileo and Newton combined may indeed fall short of a man who was deified both in Egypt and Greece, and was even worshipped by early Christians.

There is some confusion about the dating of Egyptian dynasties. While the early and great Egyptologists like Breasted and Flanders Petrie believed the first dynasty to have begun around 4400 BCE (before the common era), more modern Egyptologists date the reign of Menes, the Southern (meaning Black) unifier of Egypt to 3100 BCE. This attempt to minimise the length of Egyptian civilisation has been shown to be based on astronomical information, which they have assumed was not available before 2700 BCE.

However, more recent research has shown that the heliacal rising of Sirius was known long before this date, and that a more correct dating for Menes was probably 4400 BCE or thereabouts. Interestingly too, Sir Flanders Petrie found soft iron embedded in the Great Pyramid, which would also mean that the working of iron began, as far as we know, in Africa.

One may ask what all of this has to do with Imhotep. The answer is that while modern Egyptologists place him somewhere around 2600 BCE (over 2000 years before Hippocrates), Imhotep may well have existed somewhat closer to 4000 BCE. He was born somewhere in the Western desert region of Egypt, and although he was an apparently simple, Black commoner, his father was also an architect. He was thus bequeathed one of his several skills from early childhood.

It is not clear whether his father worked for the Pharaoh Djoser, but that pharaoh spotted Imhotep and made him not only a High Priest, but also his main astronomer and scribe. Imhotep was therefore a scribe, a poet, an architect, and astronomer and a phenomenal medical doctor.

If we begin with his architectural prowess, which he combined with his knowledge of astronomy, he built most noticeably the step pyramid of Djoser. He was, as far as we know, the first great builder in stone. The pyramid, constructed so as to be in alignment with the star system, was 32 stories in height, the vast majority of it underground. This was probably the first pyramid since before this mastabas or flat tombs were used for royal burials. It would seem that either he began with a mastaba, or that he deliberately built over an already existing one. He had paved the way for the building of the Giza pyramids, also constructed to imitate a star system, this time the Milky Way.

It is clear, however, that what Imhotep is best known for was his medical skills. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, probably copied from an earlier version, would indicate that medicine was very highly advanced, even before Imhotep. Although only one third of the original was found, it details the various anatomical structure of the body, including in considerable detail the brain, and its functioning. It also shows that Imhotep knew about the circulation of the blood at least 4000 years before the West. It is assumed that a military doctor wrote the Papyrus, since several of the wounds featured and their method of treatment would seem to have come from wars.

Imhotep would therefore not have come into a vacuum and created everything from scratch, even if some scholars assume that he wrote the Edwin Smith papyrus. He is known to have treated more than 200 diseases, among them 15 diseases of the abdomen, 11 of the bladder, 10 of the rectum, 29 of the eyes and 15 of the skin. As with other Egyptian doctors, he could diagnose a patient from carefully analysing the details of the face of that patient.

He was worshipped as a god for more than 3000 years after his death. He was considered the god of medicine until 525 BCE, between 525 BCE and 550 CE (in the Common Era) as a complete deity. Yet almost no one in our schools know of him.