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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
14 figures
Adi Shankara
700 – 750Systematised Advaita Vedanta and reorganised Hindu monasticism.
Li Bai
701 – 762Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.
Du Fu
712 – 770The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.
Sei Shōnagon
966 – 1017The Pillow Book invented the list-essay a millennium before the internet.
Murasaki Shikibu
973 – 1014Wrote the world's first psychological novel, a thousand years ago.
Al-Biruni
973 – 1048Measured Earth's radius to within 1% and wrote the first comparative anthropology of India.
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
980 – 1037Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.
Avicenna's student Al-Juzjani
980 – 1070Preserved and completed Ibn Sina's corpus.
Shen Kuo
1031 – 1095Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.
Omar Khayyam
1048 – 1131Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.
Al-Ghazali
1058 – 1111Reoriented Islamic thought toward inwardness and challenged the philosophers on their own ground.
Rumi
1207 – 1273Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.
Hafez
1325 – 1390Persia's beloved lyric poet; his divan is still consulted as an oracle.
Sejong the Great
1397 – 1450Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.