A COMMONER MADE GOD: NOVEL OF IMHOTEP

Imhotep is the first life in the Ancient Civilisations series. He built the first pyramid. He practised medicine more than two thousand years before Hippocrates. He became a god. Imhotep was the son of a commoner who rose to become the most trusted advisor of Pharaoh Djoser: architect, physician, priest, sage, and the man who conceived and built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first large stone structure ever raised by human hands. He wrote medical texts of such precision and rationality that they remained in use for millennia. He understood wound infection, surgical procedure, and pharmacology in an age when medicine was indistinguishable from magic. And he worked to distinguish them. He died around 2600 BC. Within a few centuries, the Egyptians were leaving offerings at his tomb. By the Ptolemaic period, he had been deified as the god of medicine and healing. The Greeks identified him with Asclepius. Roman soldiers left plaques at his shrine. His path from brilliant human being to divine figure is one of the most extraordinary trajectories in the ancient world. This richly imagined dramatisation reconstructs the man behind the myth: the architectural genius who solved problems of structural engineering that had never been attempted before, the physician whose methods were rational in a world that was not, and the adviser whose relationship with Djoser combined the personal and the political in ways that the historical record makes tantalizingly visible. It is a novel about what genius looks like before it has a name for itself, about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about a human mind so remarkable that his civilisation eventually concluded he could not have been human at all. Told with the scope and exactness the subject demands, this is the story of the first named architect in history, and one of the most extraordinary lives the ancient world produced. A Commoner Made God is the first novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.