← Fame through time1000-1 BC
The 1st millennium BC
Whose working lives fell in the 1st millennium BC. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1st millennium BC, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Julius Caesar22 decades - 2
Aristotle22 decades - 3
Alexander the Great22 decades - 4
Plato22 decades - 5
Homer22 decades - 6
Confucius12 decades - 7
Augustus22 decades - 8
Socrates22 decades - 9
Cleopatra22 decades - 10
Archimedes22 decades - 11
Qin Shi Huang4 decades - 12
Cicero22 decades - 13
Pythagoras22 decades - 14
Virgil22 decades - 15
Cyrus the Great22 decades - 16
Ashoka8 decades - 17
Hannibalnot measured- - 18
Laozi11 decades - 19
Herodotus22 decades - 20
Gautama Buddha16 decades - 21
Sophocles22 decades - 22
Euclid22 decades - 23
Tiberiusnot measured- - 24
Sun Tzu8 decades - 25
Ovid22 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.