Imhotep, “he who comes in peace,” was an architect and priest during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, in the 27th century BCE. The building attributed to Imhotep, the Pyramid of Djoser, is the earliest large-scale stone building in Egypt and the first pyramid to be used as a tomb. Whereas earlier pharaohs were interred in a rectangular mastaba, a rectangular tomb made of mud-brick, Imhotep’s pyramid was stone and on a colossal scale. The materials used were not simply piled atop each other, rather, the different qualities of building materials caused the four sides to lean into each other, further supporting the structure. Of course, pyramids were not only tombs – they contained within them shrines to the fallen pharaoh, including various parts of his divided soul, so in addition to the structure itself, there existed a whole complex both around and underneath the pyramid.

The pyramid was to become the most enduring symbol of Egyptian architecture for millennia to come, and it is largely owing to Imhotep’s engineering that this is the case. For his contributions, Imhotep was deified in Egypt as a god of knowledge and medicine, and further incorporated into Greek and Roman lists of gods and heroes. Less auspiciously, Imhotep’s name was also used as the name of the malevolent mummy in Universal’s 1932 and 1999 films.