Macarius of Egypt

A camel driver by trade, Macarius withdrew around the age of thirty to the desert of Scetis, between the Nile and Libya, where his reputation drew a colony of hermits that became one of the great centres of Christian monasticism. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers credit him with about a hundred maxims, brief and unemphatic, which formed centuries of monks in both East and West. Exiled for a time by the Arians, he returned to die among his disciples after sixty years in the desert. The monasteries of Wadi El Natrun, still inhabited, descend directly from his foundation.