The Most Influential People in History
30 Names, Why They Matter, and the Myths About Them

Lists of the most influential people in history are popular, and the same stories tend to travel with them. This page takes 30 people who changed how others lived, ruled, travelled, learned or thought.

For each, you get the dates, a line or two on why they matter, and one popular story, set beside the sources.

Where we already have a full page on someone, the entry here is short and links to it. Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great and Joan of Arc have full entries here and a page of their own as well.

How the list was chosen

This is our selection, not a ranking. Influence across four thousand years can’t be measured on one scale. So the people below run in rough order of date, and the number beside each name is only its place in the list.

The list favours people whose acts are well recorded and who changed something lasting: law, government, trade, science, printing, travel or freedom. It is spread across regions and eras, and seven of the 30 are women.

Living people and politicians active after about 1950 are left out. So are the founders of religions, so that the page describes history without taking sides on anyone’s faith.

Several people here also did things that cost others their lives or freedom. For them, the page sets down what the record shows on both sides, and leaves the judgement to you.

Each entry ends with a verdict on one popular claim. The verdict is about the claim, not the person.

The ancient world

1. Hammurabi (reigned 1792–1750 BC)

Why he matters. Hammurabi ruled Babylon. His laws are carved on a great basalt stele, found at Susa in 1901–1902.

The penalties depended on who you were. If a man put out another man’s eye, his own eye was to be put out. If the victim was a freed man, he was to pay one gold mina instead.

The claim. Hammurabi’s code was the first law code.

Doesn't hold up Older law collections are now known, so Hammurabi’s was not the first. The idea had a real starting point. When the stele was found, his laws were hailed as the earliest known.

The laws of Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, were written about 300 years before Hammurabi’s. Samuel Noah Kramer, the scholar who first identified them, wrote in 1952 that even by the very lowest estimates Ur-Nammu reigned about 2050 BC. The laws of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin, from around 1930 BC, are older than Hammurabi’s too.

2. Hatshepsut (ruled about 1479/1473–1458/57 BC)

Why she matters. Hatshepsut was a ruling queen of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty. When her husband, Thutmose II, died, she seems to have taken over the government. Later she took the full set of royal titles and ruled as king alongside her nephew, Thutmose III.

She built across Egypt, above all a terraced temple at Thebes, known today as Deir el-Bahari. After her death, her image and name were erased from many monuments.

The claim. Hatshepsut was the first woman to rule Egypt as king.

Doesn't hold up Hatshepsut is the better-known name, but an earlier queen came first. Sobekneferu was a ruling queen at the end of the twelfth dynasty, with her own royal names.

University College London’s Digital Egypt dates her reign to 1798/97–1794/93 BC, and the Louvre, on a statue of her, to 1785–1781 BC. Egyptian chronologies differ. Fewer of her monuments survive, which is one reason she is less well known.

3. Cyrus the Great (about 600–530 BC)

Why he matters. Cyrus II founded the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The Encyclopaedia Iranica dates his life to about 600–530 BC, and his rise to king of Persia to 559 BC.

The clay Cyrus Cylinder begins with his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. In it, as a Yale Peabody Museum summary puts it, he announces that people who had been exiled could return home, and that local religion could be practised.

The Book of Ezra preserves two versions of a decree of his letting the Jews rebuild their temple in Jerusalem.

The claim. The Cyrus Cylinder is the world’s first charter of human rights.

Doesn't hold up The human-rights label came much later. The cylinder itself is real, and so is its message of return and restoration. Irving Finkel, then an assistant keeper at the British Museum, said at Yale in 2024: “There are no human rights in antiquity”.

He added that the object has since become a genuine symbol of human rights, a meaning it took on long after it was made. There is more in Cyrus the Great: What the Cyrus Cylinder Says, and What the Sources Show About 8 Famous Stories.

4. Alexander the Great (356–323 BC)

Why he matters. Alexander became king of Macedon in 336 BC after his father, Philip II, was assassinated. He defeated the Persian king Darius at Gaugamela on 1 October 331 BC and took over the Persian Empire.

His conquest restored that empire to the borders it had under Darius I, and kept its system of provinces. He also burned Persepolis in the spring of 330 BC.

The claim. Alexander wept because there were no more worlds to conquer.

Doesn't hold up In the ancient source, Alexander weeps for nearly the opposite reason. That source is Plutarch’s essay On Tranquillity of Mind.

In W. C. Helmbold’s translation, he has just heard Anaxarchus talk about an infinite number of worlds. He asks whether it is not “worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one”. There is more in Alexander the Great: What the Ancient Sources Say About 10 Famous Stories.

5. Ashoka (3rd century BC)

Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor of the 3rd century BC, had his own words carved on rocks and pillars across his empire. Our page Ashoka: What His Own Edicts Say goes through them.

The claim. After the Kalinga war, Ashoka renounced violence.

Doesn't hold up His remorse for the war is real, and in his own words, but he kept the threat of force. The same edict also warns the forest peoples of “the power (to punish them) which Devanampriya (possesses) in spite of (his) repentance”, in E. Hultzsch’s translation. Devanampriya is how the edicts name the king.

6. Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BC)

Why he matters. He was the king of Qin who became the first emperor of a unified China. He set up a central, orderly system of officials. He also standardised weights and measures, coinage and the writing system, and those standards lasted long after his dynasty fell.

The first Great Wall was built during his reign, though it is not the wall that stands today. The terracotta warriors buried around his tomb were found in 1974, and the site is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

The claim. He burned the books and buried 460 Confucian scholars alive.

Partly The burning of the books is well attested, but the burial of the scholars is less certain. Both stories come from the historian Sima Qian.

Sima Qian records an order to burn privately held copies of the Odes, the Documents and the writings of the hundred schools. Books on medicine, divination and planting trees were spared.

He also records that more than 460 men who had broken the prohibitions were all buried at Xianyang (our translations). This came after the emperor was angered by alchemists who had spent vast sums and never found an elixir.

In a 2008 lecture, the historian Anthony Barbieri-Low said there is abundant historical proof for the burning of the books. But the killing of 460 Confucian scholars, he said, “has been greatly misinterpreted, and may have never occurred”.

7. Julius Caesar (100–44 BC)

Caesar was born in July 100 BC by the usual date. He conquered Gaul, won a civil war and was stabbed to death on the Ides of March, 44 BC, with twenty-three wounds. Our Caesar page tells the story.

The claim. Julius Caesar was a Roman emperor.

Doesn't hold up Rome was still a republic in his lifetime. The first emperor was his adopted heir, who received the title Augustus from the Senate in January 27 BC.

In our reading, the two men are so closely linked that the title of emperor often drifts back a generation. But the record makes Augustus, not Caesar, the first of the Roman emperors.

From Tang China to the Mongols

8. Wu Zetian (624–705)

Why she matters. In 690 Wu Zetian proclaimed herself emperor. She toppled the Tang, founded her own Zhou dynasty and ruled until shortly before her death in 705.

She recruited officials more widely, and in 693 she made her Rules for Officials part of the examination curriculum. Her purges also left countless people dead or in exile, among them her own brothers and sons.

The claim. Wu Zetian was the only woman to rule China as emperor in her own name.

Holds up Both historians we read say so. Victor Xiong calls her “the only woman to ever rule the entire country in her own right”. Yuen Ting Lee calls her “the first and only woman emperor of China”.

9. Saladin (1137/38–1193)

Saladin, born Yusuf ibn Ayyub in 1137 or 1138, united Egypt and Syria. He defeated the crusader army at Hattin in 1187 and took Jerusalem the same year.

He died in Damascus on 4 March 1193. Our Saladin page covers him.

The claim. Saladin let everyone in Jerusalem go free in 1187.

Partly Many people went free, but not everyone, and freedom had a price. According to his biographer Baha ad-Din, the ransom was ten dinars for a man, five for a woman and one for a child.

Thousands of poor people were freed without paying. The Frankish chronicle attributed to Ernoul says Saladin had the poor let out of the city without counting, as his own alms.

The same chronicle says about 11,000 were still unransomed at the end. Under the terms, they remained slaves. Saladin’s secretary, Imad ad-Din, counts 8,000 women and children alone, in a passage quoted by the historian Andrew Holt.

10. Genghis Khan (1162 or 1167–1227)

Genghis Khan united the Mongol peoples, was confirmed as khan over them all at an assembly in 1206, and died in 1227 during his last campaign. Historians give his birth as probably 1162 or 1167. Our Mongol page checks ten claims about him.

The claim. Genghis Khan was his name.

Doesn't hold up His birth name was Temüjin. Genghis Khan was a title, and it became so famous that it is easy to take for a name.

Travellers, rulers and printers

11. Mansa Musa (ruled Mali; pilgrimage 1324)

In 1324 Mansa Musa, the ruler of Mali, passed through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Our Mansa Musa page goes through what the medieval writers recorded.

The claim. Mansa Musa was the richest person who ever lived.

Can't confirm No surviving record could settle the modern claim. His wealth impressed medieval writers, though. A map made around 1375 calls him “the richest and noblest ruler of this whole region”, in the British Library’s translation. That is a narrower claim than the modern one.

12. Ibn Battuta (1304–1368 or 1369)

Why he matters. Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304, into a family of legal scholars. In 1325 he set out on pilgrimage to Mecca.

His travels went on for around 29 years. By one estimate he covered about 75,000 miles, through the equivalent of 44 modern countries.

At the sultan of Morocco’s insistence, he dictated his account, the Rihla, to the scholar Ibn Juzayy. He died in 1368 or 1369.

The claim. Everything in Ibn Battuta’s book is his own eyewitness account.

Partly Much of it is. But Ibn Juzayy borrowed descriptions of Mecca, Medina and Damascus from a twelfth-century traveller, Ibn Jubayr. That makes it hard to know exactly which parts reflect Ibn Battuta’s own experience.

13. Zheng He (1371–1433 or 1435)

Why he matters. Zheng He commanded the Ming dynasty’s seven great sea voyages, from 1405 to 1433. His fleets sailed through the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, and down the east coast of Africa.

Sources differ on whether he died in 1433 or 1435. As a UCLA talk on his voyages put it, the written record about him is very thin.

The claim. His treasure ships were about 400 feet long.

Still argued The sources themselves disagree. The Ming dynasty’s official history gives the ships as 44 zhang, about 137 metres. A stone tablet in Nanjing suggests about 71 metres.

A study by the Ming historian Sally Church and two naval architects found that a ship of 137 metres could have been built. But Church said the result rested on many assumptions. She added: “I don’t think it could’ve been possible. On the other hand there isn’t hard evidence on either side.”

A speaker at UCLA took 400 feet as given. The evidence we read does not settle it.

14. Johannes Gutenberg (about 1400–1468)

Why he matters. Gutenberg is generally credited with inventing a way to make uniform, interchangeable metal type. His Bible, probably finished late in 1455 at Mainz, was the first great book printed in western Europe from movable metal type. His press put books within reach of far more readers.

The claim. Gutenberg invented printing with movable type.

Partly He was not the first to print with movable type, though his version is the one that spread across Europe. It had been made in China and Korea long before him.

In China, Bi Sheng made movable type from baked clay between 1041 and 1048. The scholar Shen Kuo described characters cut in sticky clay, thin as the rim of a coin, one character to each piece, and fired hard (our translation).

In Korea, the Buddhist book Jikji was printed with movable metal type in 1377. That was 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible, according to the National Library of France, which holds it.

How Chinese printing came to Europe is still uncertain. Gutenberg’s achievement was a metal-type process and press that spread across Europe.

15. Joan of Arc (1412–1431)

Why she matters. Joan was born on 6 January 1412. By the reckoning of the time, that was still 1411, since the year then began at Easter.

She was with the army that raised the siege of Orléans on 8 May 1429, and saw Charles crowned at Reims on 17 July 1429. Captured, she was tried by a church court at Rouen and burned there on 30 May 1431. There is more in Joan of Arc: What the Record Shows About 10 Famous Stories.

The claim. Joan of Arc was burned as a witch.

Doesn't hold up She was condemned as a relapsed heretic, not as a witch, though the story has roots in the trial itself. Witchcraft was in the first list of charges.

That first act of accusation ran to seventy articles, and one said she had claimed that using witchcraft, divination and superstition was not a sin. But the judges cut the list to twelve articles.

After she abjured, renouncing her errors and swearing never to return to them, she put on men’s clothes again. The final sentence, in T. Douglas Murray’s 1902 edition, condemned her as a “heretic, relapsed into heresy”. In 1456 a church court annulled the condemnation and declared it wicked and unjust.

16. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)

Leonardo was born in Vinci in 1452 and died at Amboise in 1519. Painter, engineer and student of anatomy, he is the model for the Renaissance man. Our page on that idea covers him.

The claim. Leonardo mastered everything he tried.

Partly His range is well recorded, but so is how much he left undone. His early biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote that he “began many things and never finished one of them”, in Gaston du C. de Vere’s translation.

17. Suleiman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–1566)

Why he matters. Suleiman became Ottoman sultan in September 1520. His reign lasted 46 years, the longest in Ottoman history. In the West he became known as Suleiman the Magnificent.

His Ottoman honorific was Kanuni, the law giver. He is one of the lawmakers shown in relief above the gallery doors of the House chamber in the US Capitol.

He had his popular son Mustafa executed, and his son Bayezid was strangled at his father’s order.

The claim. Suleiman earned the title Lawgiver by creating Ottoman law.

Partly His work on the law did earn him the title, but the law itself was not new. He collected and edited the law books of the sultans before him, and added a number of statutes to make a single text that applied more widely.

18. Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

Why she matters. Elizabeth I reigned over England from 1558 to 1603. She withstood the huge military threat of the Spanish Armada. And in an age convinced that a woman could not govern, she ruled for nearly 45 years.

The claim. At Tilbury, Elizabeth told her troops, “I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Still argued Historians disagree about whether these are her words. She did speak to the army there on 9 August 1588, and different versions of the speech survive. The famous wording comes from copies made by Leonel Sharp, a clergyman who was present.

The historian Susan Frye argued in 1992 that the speech surfaced in Sharp’s 1623 letter, in a context “which casts doubt on its authenticity”.

On the other side, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s catalogue of English literary manuscripts records a copy in Sharp’s own hand, published by Janet M. Green in 1997. It also notes that the historian J. E. Neale supported the queen’s authorship. The evidence we read does not settle it.

Science, revolution and freedom

19. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Galileo was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564 and died on 8 January 1642. In June 1633 the Inquisition convicted him of vehement suspicion of heresy, and his sentence was turned into house arrest. Our page on twelve Renaissance lives covers him.

The claim. After his trial, Galileo muttered “And yet it moves”.

Can't confirm The line can’t be confirmed as his. The earliest known printing of the line is in a book published in London in 1757, more than a century after he died.

20. Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

Why he matters. Newton’s Principia was printed in London for the Royal Society in 1687. It showed that a single mathematical law could explain both the motion of objects on earth and what happens in the heavens. He held the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge from 1669 to 1701.

The claim. An apple fell on Newton’s head and gave him the idea of gravity.

Partly The apple comes from Newton himself; the blow to the head does not. He linked the idea to a falling apple. His friend William Stukeley wrote about a visit on 15 April 1726. They sat in the garden under some apple trees.

Newton said he was in just the same situation as when the idea of gravitation first came to him. It was, Stukeley wrote, “occasion’d by the fall of an apple”. In that account, the apple does not hit him.

21. Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803)

Why he matters. Toussaint was born in 1743 to enslaved parents on the Bréda plantation, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. He became the leader of its revolution.

He sided with France after the French government abolished slavery in 1794. In July 1801 he proclaimed a constitution that named him governor for life. Betrayed and captured by the French, he was shipped to the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains, where he died in April 1803.

The historian Sudhir Hazareesingh also notes the other side of the record. Notarial records suggest that, as a free man before the revolution, Toussaint leased a coffee plantation for a while, with thirteen enslaved people on it. And some historians have likened his rules for plantation labour to a restoration of slavery.

The claim. Toussaint Louverture led Haiti to independence.

Partly He led the revolution, but he died before independence came. Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his generals declared it at Gonaïves on 1 January 1804.

Hazareesingh writes that Toussaint’s achievements paved the way for an independent state.

22. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769 and died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821. His Civil Code dates from 21 March 1804.

In 1802 he re-established slavery. A law of 20 May 1802 kept it in force in the colonies France had just recovered. Our Napoleon page covers the rest.

The claim. Napoleon was unusually short.

Doesn't hold up The short Napoleon owes a lot to a mix-up over units. Three French sources gave his height as just over 5 pieds 2 pouces. But the French inch, the pouce, was about 2.7 cm, longer than the English inch.

Read as French measures, that is about 1.67 metres. Read as English feet and inches, it shrinks to 5 ft 2 in.

23. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830)

Why he matters. Bolívar was born in Caracas on 24 July 1783 and led the wars against Spanish rule in South America. His victory at Boyacá in August 1819 cleared the way to independence for Venezuela, New Granada, Bolivia, Ecuador and, in time, Peru. Bolivia, formed in August 1825, was named in his honour.

He held great power. In Peru he was, in the historian Richard E. Bennett’s words, “acting with virtual dictatorial authority”.

He wrote Peru’s constitution of 1826. According to the Peruvian Congress, it was approved by the Council of Government on 1 July 1826, ratified on 30 November and sworn on 9 December. He died at Santa Marta on 17 December 1830.

The claim. Bolívar abolished slavery in the lands he liberated.

Partly He acted against slavery, but slavery went on long after. He proclaimed freedom for enslaved people who joined his cause, and called for the end of slavery when he founded Bolivia. But, as Bennett writes, “abolished on paper, slavery endured for at least another fifty years as forced servile labor.”

24. Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809. As the 16th president he saw the United States through the Civil War, and his Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863.

He was shot at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865 and died the next day. Our comeback stories page looks at his early life.

The claim. Lincoln failed at almost everything before he became president.

Doesn't hold up He had successes as well as defeats before he became president. Lincoln lost elections, but he was also elected to Congress in 1846. The famous list of his failures was wired out as a filler story by Hearst’s International News Service in 1920.

25. Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Why he matters. Darwin changed the way we understand the natural world. His On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, angered some members of the Church of England.

“Survival of the fittest” was Herbert Spencer’s phrase, as our page on quotes that get cut short explains.

The claim. Darwin was the first to propose that species evolve.

Doesn't hold up Darwin himself named people who came before him. In a historical sketch added to later editions of the Origin, he notes that Lamarck first published his views in 1801.

He also wrote that in 1831 Patrick Matthew gave “precisely the same view on the origin of species” as the one Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace later put forward. Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers on natural selection were read together on 1 July 1858.

26. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

Why he matters. Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818 by the National Park Service’s dates. He himself wrote that he had no accurate knowledge of his age.

On 3 September 1838 he escaped, disguised as a sailor, and became an abolitionist, suffragist, publisher and author. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in Boston in 1845. He died on 20 February 1895.

The claim. Frederick Douglass taught himself to read.

Partly He had help to start, then did much of the work himself. In his Narrative, he writes that Sophia Auld “very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C”. Then her husband stopped her, saying it was “unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read”.

After that, he made friends of all the little white boys he met in the street and, in his words, “converted [them] into teachers”.

27. Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)

Why she matters. Florence Nightingale is best known to the public as a nurse in the Crimean War. But, as Neil A. Bradshaw writes in a study of her work, she spent most of her life analysing data.

Her work on army medical statistics made her the first female fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. And her polar area diagram of the causes of soldiers’ deaths in the Crimea is still reproduced.

The claim. Florence Nightingale invented the pie chart.

Doesn't hold up The pie chart is older than her work, though her own diagrams are famous. The Library of Congress says the very first pie chart is in William Playfair’s The Statistical Breviary, published in 1801.

Nor was she alone in using polar area diagrams. Bradshaw notes that statisticians elsewhere in Europe used graphs, especially polar area diagrams, and used them a great deal.

28. Harriet Tubman (1822–1913)

Why she matters. Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, in early 1822, by the National Park Service’s account. After she escaped, she went back to lead family and friends to freedom.

In the Civil War, on 1 June 1863, she joined Colonel James Montgomery’s raid along the Combahee River, which freed more than 700 enslaved people. Later she campaigned for women’s suffrage. She died on 10 March 1913.

The claim. Harriet Tubman rescued 300 people.

Doesn't hold up The record supports about 70 rescues, not 300; the bigger number comes from an early biography. The National Park Service says she rescued about 70 people, family and friends, in about 13 trips to Maryland. She also gave instructions to another 70 or so, who found their own way.

In 1858 and 1859 she told people she had rescued 50 to 60 in eight or nine trips. The higher figure came from her biographer Sarah Bradford, who, the Park Service says, exaggerated the numbers in her 1868 biography.

The 20th century

29. Marie Curie (1867–1934)

Why she matters. Marie Curie was born Marya Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867. She discovered polonium and radium, and fundamentally changed our understanding of radioactivity.

She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, which the Nobel Prize organisation says was likely caused by radiation exposure.

The claim. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to win in two different sciences.

Holds up Both parts hold up. In 1903 she became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, in physics. Academics had proposed only her husband and Henri Becquerel, but Pierre Curie insisted that his wife share the honour.

Her second prize, in chemistry, came in 1911. As of 5 October 2026, the Nobel Prize site says she “was and still is the only person to be awarded Nobel prizes in two scientific categories”.

30. Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi became one of the best-known figures of the Indian independence movement, and one of the world’s leading models of nonviolent resistance. His campaigns included the Salt March, which set out on 12 March 1930. Our Gandhi page looks at his ideas.

The claim. Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Doesn't hold up Gandhi did write something in the same spirit, but the famous wording is not his. The line is not in his writings. The writer Brian Morton, in The New York Times in 2011, found no reliable documentary evidence for it, as Quote Investigator reports.

The nearest passage Gandhi wrote is in a 1913 article on snake-bite in his South African newspaper, Indian Opinion. It was published in Gujarati and translated in his Collected Works: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change”.

Gandhi died in 1948, and the earliest close match to the popular wording that Quote Investigator found is from a book chapter published in 1974.

What the myths have in common

Read together, the 30 claims fall into a few patterns. This is our reading of the list, not a finding from any one source.

• The number grew. There are the 300 rescues credited to Tubman, against the documented figure of about 70. And there are treasure ships that, in one historian’s view, may have been twice their real length.

• The story was turned round. Plutarch’s Alexander weeps because he has not conquered even one world. And Joan was condemned for heresy, not burned as a witch.

• One name took the credit. Movable type came before Gutenberg, law codes before Hammurabi, evolution before Darwin and pie charts before Nightingale. In each case, one famous name gets the credit for being first.

• A modern idea was read back. A Persian king’s cylinder becomes a human-rights charter. The label is far younger than the clay.

None of this makes these people less important. A list like this is simply more useful when it shows its sources, so a claim can be checked before it’s repeated. Our guides to checking a claim before you share it and spotting a fake quote show how.

Why it matters

Most of these stories grew from something real: a stele hailed as the first, an apple in a garden, a string of lost elections. So when a famous life gets boiled down to one neat line, it can help to ask where that line first appears, and what it leaves out.

Sources

Ancient world

• Louvre, Code de Hammurabi (Sb 8), collection record; L. W. King (trans.), The Code of Hammurabi, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, §§196, 198.
• The Schøyen Collection, The Ur-Nammu Law Code, MS 2064; Samuel Noah Kramer, Penn Museum Bulletin (1952).
• University College London, Digital Egypt: Hatshepsut, Sobekneferu, Middle Kingdom rulers; Louvre, statue of Sobekneferu (E 27135).
• M. A. Dandamayev, “Cyrus iii. Cyrus II the Great”, Encyclopaedia Iranica; Steven Scarpa, “Superstar Assyriologist Dispels Myths About Cyrus Cylinder”, Yale Peabody Museum, 6 May 2024.
• Pierre Briant, “Alexander the Great”, Encyclopaedia Iranica; Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind 4 (Moralia 466D), trans. W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library (1939), on LacusCurtius.
• E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka (1925), Rock Edict XIII.
• Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Qin dynasty; Asian Art Museum, China’s Terracotta Warriors (2013); UNESCO, Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor; Sima Qian, Shiji, ch. 6, Chinese text on Wikisource; Anthony Barbieri-Low, lecture abstract, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, 1 November 2008.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Julius Caesar”; Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 82, on LacusCurtius; Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), “Augustus”.

Tang China to the Mongols

• Victor Xiong, “Wu Zetian: The Only Woman Emperor in Chinese History”, Origins (Ohio State University); Yuen Ting Lee, “Wu Zhao: Ruler of Tang Dynasty China”, Education About Asia (2015).
• Andrew Holt, “Saladin’s legacy: some thoughts” (25 July 2017), quoting Imad ad-Din; Baha ad-Din, The Life of Saladin, trans. C. W. Wilson (Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1897); Chronique d’Ernoul, ed. L. de Mas Latrie (1871).
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators, Genghis Khan; The Secret History of the Mongols, trans. I. de Rachewiltz; David O. Morgan, “Čengiz Khan”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.

Travellers, rulers and printers

• World History Commons, Al-Umari’s account of Mansa Musa’s visit to Cairo; British Library, “African kings on medieval and Renaissance maps”.
• UC Berkeley ORIAS, The Travels of Ibn Battuta: introduction, the journey to Cairo, writing the Rihla.
• University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Asia Program, The Legacy of Zheng He and the Ming Dynasty Sea Voyages (2018); UCLA International Institute, Zheng He’s Voyages of Discovery; The National, “Zheng He’s replica ship sailing into the future on wave of past glory”, 26 September 2012.
• T. Douglas Murray (ed.), Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France (1902), trial records, introduction and chronological table.
• Library of Congress, The Gutenberg Bible (Bible collection exhibition); Library of Congress, “The History of Printing in Asia According to Library of Congress Asian Collections, Part 1” (2021); Shen Kuo, Mengxi bitan, ch. 18, Chinese text on Wikisource; Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Jikji, a treasure of the world of printing”.
• Uffizi Galleries, Leonardo, Adoration of the Magi; Giorgio Vasari, Lives, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. 4, Life of Leonardo.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tughra of Sultan Süleiman the Magnificent (collection record); Colin Jude Murtha, “Süleyman the Magnificent”, Origins (Ohio State University).
• The Newberry Library, Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend and transcription of the Tilbury speech; Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury”, Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992), doi:10.2307/2542066; Folger Shakespeare Library, Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, British Library Harley MS 6798, ElQ 227.

Science, revolution and freedom

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Galileo Galilei”; Mario Livio, “Did Galileo Truly Say, ‘And Yet It Moves’? A Modern Detective Story”.
• Cambridge Digital Library, Newton Papers; Chetham’s Library, Newton’s Principia; William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752), Newton Project transcript.
• Sudhir Hazareesingh, “Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution”, Gresham College lecture, 17 October 2022; Museum of the American Revolution, “I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom”; Duke University, Haiti’s Declaration of Independence.
• Fondation Napoléon: Napoleon Bonaparte’s early years, Napoleon’s death, the Civil Code, the re-establishment of slavery; History.com, “Was Napoleon Short?”.
• Richard E. Bennett, “El Libertador: Simon Bolivar and the Spanish American Independence Movement”, in 1820: Dawning of the Restoration (BYU Religious Studies Center), 207–30. Congreso de la República del Perú, Constitución Política de 1826; Vinicius Melleu Cione, “Bolívar y la constitución peruana de 1826”, Revista Mexicana de Historia del Derecho XLII (2020), pp. 93–110, UNAM.
• National Park Service, Myths & Facts About Harriet Tubman and Harriet Tubman.
• National Park Service, Frederick Douglass; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845), chs. 1, 6 and 7.
• National Park Service, Abraham Lincoln and Ford’s Theatre; Scott A. Sandage, essay on the myth of Lincoln’s failures, Slate, 28 May 2014; John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln (1902).
• Natural History Museum, “Charles Darwin: history’s most famous biologist”; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 6th edition (1872), “An Historical Sketch”.
• Neil A. Bradshaw, “Florence Nightingale (1820–1910): An Unexpected Master of Data”, Patterns 1(2) (2020), doi:10.1016/j.patter.2020.100036; Library of Congress, Inside Adams, “William Playfair: Statistical Graphics, Scandal and a New Library Acquisition”.

The 20th century

• The Nobel Prize, “Marie Curie” and “Facts on the Nobel Prize in Physics”.
• M. K. Gandhi, “General Knowledge About Health [-XXXII]”, Indian Opinion, 9 August 1913, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XII (1964), p. 158.
• Library of Congress, 4 Corners of the World, “The 150th Birth Anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)” (2019); Quote Investigator, “Be the Change You Wish To See in the World” (2017); History.com, “Gandhi leads civil disobedience”.

We read the primary texts above in public-domain translations and editions on Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, LacusCurtius, the Internet Archive and the Avalon Project; where the English is ours, the page says “our translation”. Two sources we could not read in full, and the page reports them only through the sources named: Susan Frye’s 1992 article (read in its published abstract) and Janet M. Green’s 1997 article; the Church study is reported through The National. Some museum pages we wanted to use (the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum’s essays, the National Portrait Gallery) block automated readers, and we did not get round those blocks.

Checked October 2026.