Here, using as best I understand them (importance
with a bit of bias towards goodness, but not so much
as to prevent the 20th century pick below) the criteria
used by TIME, are:
The Men of the Centuries
(Some centuries are more competitive than others).
- 1900's Adolf Hitler
- 1800's Karl Marx
- 1700's Thomas Jefferson
- 1600's Isaac Newton
- 1500's Martin Luther
- 1400's Leonardo da Vinci
- 1300's William of Occam
Philospher and admirer of simplicity.
- 1200's Genghis Khan
- 1100's Suryavarman II
Emperor; Had Ankor Wat built
- 1000's William of Normandy
- 900's Otto I
Founded Holy Roman Empire, stimulated a Germanic Renaissance.
- 800's Harun al-Rashid
Fifth Abbasid caliph; presided over prosperous Bagdad, a splendours court
and disintigration of Islamic empire; participated in jihad against
Byzantines; prominant in "Arabian Nights" stories.
- 700's Charlemagne
- 600's Muhammad
- 500's Pope Gregory the Great
Prefect of Rome; first monk to become Pope; greatly expanded Pope's
secular powers; helped develop Gregorian chant.
- 400's Kalidasa
India's greatest Sandskrit Dramatist
- 300's Constantine
- 200's Origen
Egyptian/Greek Philosopher; developed Christian theology.
- 100's Galen
His medical treatises were authoritative until the 16th century.
- 000's Jesus Christ
- -000's Julius Caesar
- -100's Ptolemy
- -200's Shih Huang-ti
Unified China and its wall
- -300's Alexander the Great
- -400's Siddhartha Gautam (the Buddha)
