Hammurabi of Babylon.

The first real king of human history.

He was the first to establish a code of laws, meaning every nation is de facto influenced by him because they have laws.

He was the first to put his likeness on coinage, a precedent followed to this day.

His people passionately wrote every financial transaction, a practice common today.

They discovered several planets and objects of the solar system (not particularly credited to Hammurabi).

He established the customary system. That is right. When we use a ruler (named because it was the "ruler's foot, or something like that) it is actually Hammurabi's foot. Literally, a 5000 year old measurement. We are looking at Hammurabi's foot. Fascinating really.

If i recall, he set the stage for Babylon to dominate Mesopotamia for a long while, a particularly influential region to this day.

Influence is cumulative, and Hammurabi's influence has been around a long time.

Genghis - that is fascinating, and is not a figure I've come across. I'll look him up.

Hammurabi.... I guess that would be tough to beat....

Hammurabi's code wasn't the first code of laws in existence. It's predated, for example, by Mosaic Law. It's just a well-known example.

Here's a thought: the maximum amount of influence a person can have over humanity declines over time. If you act now, the "future" will be a much larger period of time and, if the impact of your actions grows exponentially (as you would expect it to- you affect a few people/events and they in turn affect more than that). Similarly, the ratio of people who have yet to be born to people who have already been in existence will constantly be shrinking. It's essentially the butterfly effect- a small change early on will lead to much larger differences in the long run.

When a human civilization's precursor group had 10 people, killing one of them would not only kill a tenth of the group but also drastically change the future- a tenth of the people are no longer going to be represented in the gene pool, that person's entire life's impacts are now gone, and so are their secondary and tertiary and quaternary impacts, etc.

So if you want to find the most influential person in human history, you'll probably have to look in the far past. Unfortunately, we don't have many records from the Neolithic Revolution that would help us, much less the Paleolithic era.

It just might be that the most influential person of all time is someone we won't ever even hear of.

fred flinstone

The guy who invented writing. Try recording history without that biatch!

Oral Traditions were used to record history before writing....

Genghis Khan

Edited 6/26/2015 18:52:42

Jesus Christ. Without him

No holocaust
No Crusades
No Killing of Native Americans (For religion)
No unified Europe
Possibly no Renaissance
No thirty years war
Much more slavery in Europe

So... When exactly was Europe unified? Anyway, perhaps the Persians would establish dominance in Europe. Then there would be next to NO slavery. A situation similar to the Holocaust could happen - Jews would still exist, they existed before Jesus. Perhaps crusades could still occur, but differently, with different religions. Same goes for thirty years war. Maybe they would have killed Native Americans, maybe they wouldn't. Without Jesus who knows what religion would have dominated Europe?

Edited 6/26/2015 19:22:41

Forgot about mosaic law.

But in many significant ways, Hammurabi's laws were first. You've heard in sharia law that a thief gets his hand cut, or in the bible an eye for am eye? Hammurabi has those principles within his laws.

As well as familial stuff, including matters of in-law family. Eerily specific stuff.

Hammurabi was not influential. The information that you provided was only discovered in the last 200 years and has had no affect on the events of the world. Tell me how his practices, laws, ect. can be influential if they are buried in the sand for thousands of years.

I gave one example that I'll use again : the Customary measurement system.

He put his foot down, tired of seeing all of these ships being different lengths thanks to the backyards Qubits system of measuring based on your hand's length. They measured it and it was used. It's a system used for 5000 years.

Edit : or 4000-ish years, i forgot when hammurabi reigned exactly.

Edited 6/26/2015 20:53:03

1792 - 1750 BC that would be. A little under 4000 years. Very few civilisations existed 5000 years ago.

Europe would be fractured. Without the church to guide the population morally there would be nothing stopping people from enslaving others (the church forbade enslaving Christians) or all around killing each other. Monasteries were safe havens and just look at the Renaissance, all the art is CHRISTIAN!

European renaissance really isn't that great. The rest of the world was doing just fine during the dark age.

Is Jesus a part of History? or is he part of the Bible?

Without Christianity, the Roman Empire would still fall and Europe would fall into the Dark Age and it would last much longer than in ours. Without Christianity, Islam would have never developed. However, Asia would possibly take its Place

Edited 6/27/2015 01:58:19

Since the question is 'in history', the answer depends on which time you are living in. Julius Caesar was arguably the most influential during his time, as was Genghis Khan or Napoleon, not a long time ago the actions of Adolf Hitler were shaping the world, and many others. Imperial Leaders yield massive influence politically, socially and culturally.

These days, with militaristic conquests viewed as 'aggression' and absolute leaderships viewed as 'dictatorships', along with democracy becoming the norm for government, the possibility of influence and power any particular figure can assert over his people and others has decreased. The only form of control over the 'masses' I still see would probably be the invisible religious empires, particularly Christianity and Islam, where followers could be found in almost every country, and thus for me, the answer limits down to the two central figures of the respective religions - Jesus or Muhammad.

Or Zoroaster. Y'know, the guy who popularized the idea of an eternal battle between good (Ahura Mazda/Yahweh/God/Allah/monotheistic interpretations of Krishna/etc.) and evil (Ahrimanyu/Satan/The Devil/demons/etc.). Major influence in all Abrahamic religions.