Imhotep was a historical mortal — the chancellor and chief architect of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty, in the early twenty-seventh century before the common era — who, by reason of his exceptional accomplishments, was elevated after his death into the company of the gods. He was the architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first monumental stone construction in human history (before Imhotep, Egyptian royal tombs had been mud-brick mastabas; he conceived and executed the stacking of mastabas one upon another to form a stepped pyramid, and the building of it in carved limestone rather than mud-brick, and so set the entire subsequent course of pyramid-building in motion). He was credited in Egyptian tradition with the founding of medicine, with the composition of wisdom-texts, with proverbs preserved across millennia. He was, in his own lifetime, a vizier of Lower Egypt, a high priest of Heliopolis, and a master of all the arts of the literate.

His deification proceeded gradually. Already in the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians were addressing him as the patron of scribes; by the Late Period (after 700 BCE) he had become a fully divine figure, with temples dedicated to him at Saqqara, at Memphis, on Philae Island, and elsewhere. The Greeks identified him with Asclepius, their own god of medicine, and pilgrims journeyed to his temples in search of healing. The Imhotepa at Saqqara — the precinct of his cult, near the Step Pyramid he had built two thousand years earlier — drew sick devotees who slept overnight in the sanctuary in hopes of receiving a healing dream from the god. The continuity from the historical architect to the healing-deity, across some twenty-five centuries, is among the most remarkable trajectories in any documented religion.