In 1932, Bayard Taylor Horton et al 1 were the first to characterize the clinical and pathological findings of temporal arteritis in detail and to recognize this condition as a separate entity. However, the disease may have been depicted more than 3000 years earlier in an Egyptian tomb fresco, and the clinical manifestation of temporal arteritis can be found in the thousand-year-old Arabic scripts by Ali ibn Isa. This article outlines Horton’s observations on temporal arteritis and those of other seminal observers, relating their findings to the current understanding of this entity.