Imhotep: The Master Builder And Healer Of Ancient Egypt
Recognised by Nkuzify as Patron Teacher of the Year.
Imhotep is the patron Nkuzify holds up first on World Teachers' Day. He lived in ancient Egypt, and the story that has come down to us says he taught the world how to build, how to heal and how to write. This is his full story.
Our patron: Imhotep
Imhotep lived about 4,600 years ago, around 2667 to 2600 BCE. The story that has come down to us says he was born a commoner, with no royal blood and no big name behind him. All he had was a very sharp mind, and it took him right to the side of the king. He became vizier, which means the king's chief adviser, to Pharaoh Djoser, and he was also the high priest of Ra at Heliopolis. So in his own lifetime he held the highest positions in both the palace and the temple.
The master builder who taught Egypt to build in stone
Before Imhotep, the tombs of Egyptian kings were built with mud bricks, and mud bricks do not last. Tradition says he was the one who changed that. He is credited with designing the Step Pyramid at Saqqara for King Djoser, and with teaching builders how to cut, shape and stack heavy blocks of limestone so that the monument would last forever. He is also credited with bringing pillars and columns of stone into Egyptian buildings, and what builders learnt from that first big stone monument later became the foundation for the Great Pyramids of Giza.
Many people say he is the first architect in history whose name we still know. That means every builder who ever put one stone on top of another is, in a way, his student.
The teacher of medicine
Imhotep is remembered as a healer too. Many accounts say he helped move medicine away from magic and towards careful observation. He is said to have taught early doctors to follow the same steps doctors still follow today: first examine the patient, then name the illness, then decide on the treatment. The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an old Egyptian medical text that describes 48 cases of injury in a calm and practical way, and many Egyptologists believe it carries his teaching. He is also said to have taught that the mind, the body and the spirit are connected.
The Egyptians respected him so much that, in time, they worshipped him as a god of healing, and the Greeks compared him to Asclepius, their own god of medicine.
Patron of scribes and keeper of wisdom
In the time of the New Kingdom, Egyptians honoured Imhotep as the patron of scribes and as wisdom itself. Scribes are said to have poured out a little water from their water pot in his memory before starting work each day, which is like saying thank you every morning to a teacher who had been gone for over a thousand years. Tradition also says that Greek thinkers like Pythagoras and Plato travelled to Egypt to learn from the temples of wisdom that he inspired. If that is true, it means the teaching of one Egyptian official helped to feed the learning of the whole world.
Why Nkuzify holds him up
The name Nkuzify comes from the Igbo word nkuzi, which means teaching, and our work is to teach anyone anything. So when we look for examples of how big teaching can become, we look for people who taught on a grand scale and whose lessons are still alive thousands of years later. Imhotep is one of those people. He did not leave behind a school building, but he taught builders, healers and scribes through the work he left, and he did all this on the African continent, the same place we are proud to teach from.
That is why, on this Teachers' Day, we recognise him as a patron of Nkuzify and as a sign of how far back African learning goes. His name is still at work today in places like Imhotep's Legacy Academy in Canada, which guides young people from minority communities towards careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Read more about him at Britannica, World History Encyclopedia and BBC History.
Meet The Other Patrons
Ptahhotep, Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu, Fatima al-Fihri, Al-Farabi. You can also go back to the full list: Global Patrons Of Teaching: Imhotep, Ahmed Baba, Fatima Al-Fihri And More.
Thank You
Happy Teachers' Day to Imhotep, and to every teacher who keeps this long line going, from all of us at Nkuzify.
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