Islamic world
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the focus of alchemical
development moved to the Islamic World. Much more is known about Islamic
alchemy because it was better documented: indeed, most of the earlier writings
that have come down through the years were preserved as Arabic translations. The word alchemy itself was derived from the
Arabic word al-kīmiyā (الكيمياء). The early Islamic world was a melting pot for
alchemy. Platonic and Aristotelian thought, which had already been somewhat
appropriated into hermetical science, continued to be assimilated during the
late 7th and early 8th centuries through Syriac translations and scholarship.
In the late 8th century, Jābir ibn Hayyān (Latinized as
"Geber" or "Geberus") introduced a new approach to alchemy,
based on scientific methodology and controlled experimentation in the
laboratory, in contrast to the ancient Greek and Egyptian alchemists whose
works were often allegorical and unintelligible, with very little concern for
laboratory work. Jabir is thus
"considered by many to be the father of chemistry", albeit others
reserve that title for Robert Boyle or Antoine Lavoisier. The science
historian, Paul Kraus, wrote:
To form an idea of the
historical place of Jabir's alchemy and to tackle the problem of its sources,
it is advisable to compare it with what remains to us of the alchemical
literature in the Greek language. One knows in which miserable state this
literature reached us. Collected by Byzantine scientists from the tenth
century, the corpus of the Greek alchemists is a cluster of incoherent
fragments, going back to all the times since the third century until the end of
the Middle Ages.
The efforts of
Berthelot and Ruelle to put a little order in this mass of literature led only
to poor results, and the later researchers, among them in particular Mrs.
Hammer-Jensen, Tannery, Lagercrantz, von Lippmann, Reitzenstein, Ruska, Bidez,
Festugiere and others, could make clear only few points of detail ....
The study of the Greek
alchemists is not very encouraging. An even surface examination of the Greek
texts shows that a very small part only was organized according to true
experiments of laboratory: even the supposedly technical writings, in the state
where we find them today, are unintelligible nonsense which refuses any
interpretation.
It is different with
Jabir's alchemy. The relatively clear description of the processes and the
alchemical apparati, the methodical classification of the substances, mark an
experimental spirit which is extremely far away from the weird and odd
esotericism of the Greek texts. The theory on which Jabir supports his
operations is one of clearness and of an impressive unity. More than with the
other Arab authors, one notes with him a balance between theoretical teaching
and practical teaching, between the 'ilm and the amal. In vain one would seek
in the Greek texts a work as systematic as that which is presented, for example,
in the Book of Seventy.
Jabir himself clearly recognized and proclaimed the
importance of experimentation:
The first essential in
chemistry is that thou shouldest perform practical work and conduct
experiments,
for he who performs
not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree
of mastery.
Early Islamic chemists such as Jabir Ibn Hayyan, Al-Kindi
("Alkindus") and Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi ("Rasis" or
"Rhazes") contributed a number of key chemical discoveries, such as
the muriatic (hydrochloric acid), sulfuric and nitric acids, and more. The
discovery that aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, could
dissolve the noblest metal, gold, was to fuel the imagination of alchemists for
the next millennium.
Islamic philosophers also made great contributions to
alchemical hermeticism. The most influential author in this regard was arguably
Jabir. Jabir's ultimate goal was Takwin, the artificial creation of life in the
alchemical laboratory, up to, and including, human life. He analyzed each
Aristotelian element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness,
dryness, and moistness. According to
Jabir, in each metal two of these qualities were interior and two were
exterior. For example, lead was externally cold and dry, while gold was hot and
moist. Thus, Jabir theorized, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, a different
metal would result. By this reasoning,
the search for the philosopher's stone was introduced to Western alchemy. Jabir
developed an elaborate numerology whereby the root letters of a substance's
name in Arabic, when treated with various transformations, held correspondences
to the element's physical properties.
The elemental system used in medieval alchemy also
originated with Jabir. His original system consisted of seven elements, which
included the five classical elements (aether, air, earth, fire, and water) in
addition to two chemical elements representing the metals: sulphur, "the
stone which burns", which characterized the principle of combustibility,
and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties.
Shortly thereafter, this evolved into eight elements, with the Arabic concept
of the three metallic principles: sulphur giving flammability or combustion,
mercury giving volatility and stability, and salt giving solidity. The atomic theory of corpuscularianism, where
all physical bodies possess an inner and outer layer of minute particles or
corpuscles, also has its origins in the work of Jabir.
From the 9th to 14th centuries, alchemical theories faced
criticism from a variety of practical Muslim chemists, including Alkindus, Abū
al-Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, Avicenna and Ibn Khaldun. In particular, they wrote
refutations against the idea of the transmutation of metals.
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