Songwriting is particularly risky, for one big reason: music tends to date. Of the entire output of the last thousand years, very little has endured for more than a century, apart from classical music. It’s hard to imagine our descendants listening to The Beatles in their flying cars and spaceships, with genres evolving at such a pace. After all, few people are aware of the melodies of St Godric of Finchale, an English hermit and popular medieval saint, who wrote some of the oldest surviving songs in English at around the start of the 12th Century.

To stand the best chance of being remembered, it is perhaps best to choose a career in politics – but don’t try to copy your heroes from antiquity. From Caesar to Boudica, back then the best remembered rulers were renowned for their skill as warriors or military strategists. Those from more recent history – such as Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi – are known for leading revolutions or advancing human rights. Drop your weapons and focus on a good cause.

Finally, you might want to try your hand at literature. Like ideas, great stories simply never die. That is, so long as you make copies. “For ancient writers, it’s all a matter of the chance survival of texts,” says Harrison. “There are some cases where there’s only one surviving copy, and Latin literature would look very different if that had perished.” He gives the example of Virgil, the Roman poet who – after 11 years working on one text – ordered that it be destroyed on his deathbed. It wasn’t quite finished, and he was mortally embarrassed lest anyone see it. Luckily his executors kept it anyway and it’s considered one of the great epics of his time.

Don’t be royal

At first glance, being royal seems like a guarantee of immortality. But Rojek isn’t convinced. “Will people remember the Queen in 1,000 years? I don’t think so,” he says. “Royal familes are much more generational – after they die someone else comes along. I don’t think Princess Diana will be remembered even in 100 years. Henry VIII is famous but he destroyed a religion, he got rid of the Catholic Church [in the UK].”

Be lucky

When Tutankhamun took his last, feverish breath in 1323BC, probably in the city of Thebes after contracting malaria, he was just a boy king of 18. He’s not known to have achieved anything particularly remarkable. If you were placing bets, you probably wouldn’t bank on this pharaoh becoming a household name several thousand years later. Then something extraordinary happened.

Constructing a pharaoh’s tomb was a massive undertaking, which required decades of work by plasterers, painters and rock carvers over the course of their reign. But Tutankhamun died suddenly and they ran out of time. Instead he was hastily interred in a small tomb in a relatively obscure part of the Valley of the Kings. It was sealed before the paint even had a chance to dry. Over years it became buried in rubble and was eventually lost altogether.