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6-05-2015, 18:07

The History

According to various authors, alchemy first appeared in the Islamic world during the Umayyad era (Damascus, First half of the eighth century): interested in science, and particularly in alchemy, the Umayyad prince Khalid b. Yazid - grandson of Mu‘awiya, the founder of the dynasty - is said to have summoned Greek philosophers from Egypt and ordered them to translate alchemical texts from Greek and Coptic into Arabic. Although to date there is no evidence to support these stories, they are still quite plausible and likely: during the first centuries of Islam, a fervent desire to obtain knowledge and translations often caused messengers being sent in search of books, or foreign scholars being invited into schools to train local pupils.

Regardless of the true nature of the knowledge obtained during the Umayyad era, it was in the second half of the eighth century and throughout the first half of the ninth, during the ‘Abbasid era in Iraq that alchemy was first studied systematically. The wealth of knowledge that Islam inherited from more ancient traditions and which can be described as alchemy is, essentially, the heritage that one of its first authors, Pseudo-Democritus (Bolus of Mendes? Second century BCE) already considered as a part of his school of learning. In his book Physika kai mystika he divided matter into four large groups: gold, silver, stones, and purple. Except for the latter, ‘‘purple’’ - if ‘‘purple’’ here really means a dye for textiles - alchemy would therefore be a school of learning involving the most noble parts of the arts of fire: working precious metals and certainly imitating them and making colored glass (imitating precious stones and various kinds of glazing). The secrecy enshrouding all these techniques (the theory that probably laid behind these techniques remains unknown) would seem, on one hand, to be the legacy of very ancient times when techniques were considered sacred; on the other, it would seem to relate to the ‘‘operational’’ need to protect certain production secrets.

Between the eighth and ninth centuries there was a rapid increase in translations into Arabic: certainly, the whole corpus of work attributed to Ballnas (Apollonius of Tyana), a corpus that seems to be the origin of alchemical cosmology (see below); a large group of works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, an author that, according to a particular interpretation, was translated into Arabic as Hermes of the Hermeses (Harmis al-Haramisa), ‘‘triple’’ (one name, three persons), or bearer of three sciences, as well as a great number of essays and comments attributed to more or less known real or pseudoepigraphical authors such as Cleopatra, Mary the Copt, Ostanes, Zosimus, Stephanus, Olympiodorus, etc.

After incorporating Greek alchemical traditions, most likely along with traditions from Ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, the Muslim world soon started producing its own works. Amongst its first authors there is Jabir b. Hayyan (eighth-ninth century), credited by tradition witii approximately 3,000 titles, which obviously were not all his own work, but came from his school of learning. Even the above mentioned Khalid b. Yazid is credited with certain works, and many other later authors who, as time went by, gave birth to the three fundamental genres within Arab alchemical literature: technical and philosophical alchemical texts, like those of al-RazI and Maslama al-Majrltl (tenth century, Iran, and Spain); allegorical texts, like those of Ibn Umayl al-TamIml (tenth century, Egypt) - and later (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), those of al-‘IraqI and al-Jildaki - which were at once celebrations of their ancient legacy while at the same time a continuation of the tradition of secrecy; finally, there are the recipes, often included in many alchemical texts. Found as beautiful calligraphy within the works, or as mere scribbles in their margins or on white spaces and flyleaves, recipes complete a picture that becomes to be increasingly defined as a single ‘‘object’’ with infinite facets.

Since the middle of the twelfth century, all these works, which were known and translated in Muslim Spain, were transferred into medieval Latin: with Robert of Chester’s translation of the Morienus in 1144, Arab alchemy entered the Christian world: a different adventure, a different story, that we shall not deal with here.



 

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