← 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
Alexander the Great22 decades - 2
Cleopatra22 decades - 3
Qin Shi Huang4 decades - 4
Cyrus the Great22 decades - 5
Ashoka8 decades - 6
Darius the Great11 decades - 7
Spartacus22 decades - 8
Nebuchadnezzar II4 decades - 9
Herod the Great22 decades - 10
Philip II of Macedon6 decades - 11
Chandragupta Maurya9 decades - 12
Pyrrhus of Epirus0 decades - 13
Ptolemy I Soter1 decades - 14
Darius III13 decades - 15
Seleucus I Nicator0 decades - 16
Ashurbanipal13 decades - 17
Caesarion19 decades - 18
Emperor Jimmu6 decades - 19
Cambyses II0 decades - 20
Sennacherib22 decades - 21
Roxananot measured- - 22
Antiochus IV Epiphanes6 decades - 23
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus0 decades - 24
Alexander IV of Macedon0 decades - 25
Ptolemy II Philadelphus3 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.