Changes

The ancient world is full of many personalities who changed the course of history. The names of these people live on today, thousands of years after they have died in many cases, because they impacted so many aspects of life in the ancient world. Among some of the best known are warriors, such as Miltiades the hero of the Battle of Marathon and Xenophon, who was a veteran of the Peloponnesian War and possibly the world’s first military historian. Kings and statesmen like Pericles of Athens, Ramesses II of Egypt, and Hammurabi of Babylon are also fairly well-known, at least their names are, in the modern world. Of course, one cannot forget some of the world’s greatest thinkers: Socrates, Plato, Archimedes, and Ptolemy were all philosophers and scientists who are rightfully remembered for challenging the status quo and introducing mankind to rational thinking. But long before Ptolemy discovered longitude and latitude and even before Archimedes devised his incredible inventions, there was an engineer, doctor, and thinker named Imhotep who lived in Egypt during the middle of the third millennium BC.