The world’s first polymath?

Photo by Galen C. Dalrymple, copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.

I shared pictures of this step pyramid before, but today I’d like to focus not so much on the structure itself, nor even the pharaoh for whom it was built. Today, I want to talk about the man who designed and built it: Imhotep. (No, no relation to the Imhotep from the Mummy movies. Sorry!)

Imhotep is considered by many to be the world’s first polymath. What is a polymath? Someone who has vast knowledge about a wide range of topics. That description certainly fits Imhotep.

For one thing, Imhotep is the first known architect by name. Though the Great Pyramids of Giza are far more famous, the pyramid of Djoser was build in the mid-27th century BCE. That means it is roughly 100 years older than the ones at Giza. Not only did he dream up this first-of-its-kind pyramidal structure, but he also is credited with using columns before anyone else, and for revolutionizing how stone was used in buildings.

But he wasn’t only an architect. He wrote texts that made huge contributions to medicine that included early diagnosis and treatments.

His knowledge and expertise were so vast that in 525 BCE, millennia after he died, he was so revered that he was elevated to the status of a full deity, becoming the Egyptian god of science, medicine, and architecture.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: On June 24, 1997, U.S. Air Force officials released a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.

Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies. The town of Roswell, located near the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight of the public’s UFO fascination. 

The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

On July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50th anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released yet another report on the controversial subject. Titled “The Roswell Report, Case Closed,” the document stated definitively that there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO sightings, and that the “bodies” recovered were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in vain, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center. – The History Channel

TRIVIA FOR TODAY: The two “T”s in the Tostitos logo are actually two people sharing a tortilla chip over a bowl of salsa, which is the red dot over the the “i.”