Galen in the Late Antique, Byzantine, and Syro-Arabic Alchemical Traditions

Abstract

The main source that allows us to explore the origins of alchemy in the Graeco-Roman Egypt along with its late antique and Byzantine developments is a large collection of Greek alchemical writings (usually referred to as Greek alchemical corpus) that is handed down in various Byzantine manuscripts nowadays kept in important European libraries.1 Next to this collection, a few Greek papyri have been preserved in the hot and dry sand of Egypt; in particular, the so-called Leiden and Stockholm papyri (third–fourth century AD), sometimes defined as “(al)chemical handbooks”, collect hundreds of recipes describing metallurgical techniques, procedures for dyeing stones and wool, and methods for producing gold and silver inks.2 Different branches of medicine, such as pharmacology and surgery, are evoked in these alchemical texts. The four books on dyeing attributed to the philosopher Democritus (first century AD) urge the young practitioners, who want to prepare dyeing pharmaka, to follow the example of physicians, who carefully test the qualities of natural substances before mixing them in a healing drug.3 Indeed, eleven entries from Dioscorides’ On Materials for Medicine have been copied in the last two leaves of the Leiden papyrus (fols. 14-16), where they are introduced by the following title: “From Dioscorides’ On Materials (of Medicine)” (“Dioskoridou ek tou peri hylēs”). Each entry includes a short description of a mineral ingredient, thus providing alchemists with a helpful tool for identifying the natural substances and their properties. Not only issues of identification troubled ancient alchemists. They also tried to determine the exact quantities required in the different processes that were described in the texts they used to study and put into practice. In order to respond to such a practical need, Byzantine alchemical collections include a short metrological work attributed to the Egyptian