← 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
Aristotle22 decades - 2
Plato22 decades - 3
Confucius12 decades - 4
Socrates22 decades - 5
Archimedes22 decades - 6
Pythagoras22 decades - 7
Laozi11 decades - 8
Gautama Buddha16 decades - 9
Euclid22 decades - 10
Diogenesnot measured- - 11
Aesop21 decades - 12
Heraclitus22 decades - 13
Epicurus22 decades - 14
Thales of Miletus22 decades - 15
Democritus22 decades - 16
Xenophon22 decades - 17
Eratosthenes22 decades - 18
Zhuang Zhou10 decades - 19
Strabo22 decades - 20
Parmenides22 decades - 21
Anaximander22 decades - 22
Empedocles22 decades - 23
Zeno of Citium3 decades - 24
Anaxagoras22 decades - 25
Zeno of Elea11 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.