The Treasure of Alexander – Stories of Discovery and Authorship

In modern times, the author has acquired a role and a connotation that deeply influence our perception of the ways in which texts were produced and circulated in different historical contexts. Authorship of mediaeval texts worked differently, and this peculiarity is even more evident in the case of pseudoauthorship. The case of Alexander the Great as the alleged author of technical treatises is an example of the emergence of a new syllabus by means of the attribution of a specific corpus to an authoritative, though fictional, author. The materials ascribed to Alexander found their way into many different texts dealing with technical and scientific topics. This paper explores the contents of The Treasure of Alexander, and attempts to delineate the complex dialogue between The Treasure and other works. The known manuscript and new witnesses are brought together and become objects of a comprehensive philological analysis, in order to reconstruct the textual history of The Treasure. In the appendices to this paper, I offer a new edition and English translation of the Fundlegende, which serves as frame tale for the technical syllabus, along with its table of contents. 1 The Treasure of Alexander The Treasure of Alexander (Kitāb ḏaḫīrat al-Iskandar) is a compilation of technical materials, collected from widely different sources. It is arranged into ten sections, the contents of which range from alchemy to the engraving of astrological talismans and the useful properties of animals. The Treasure of Alexander has already || This paper was presented for the first time in October 2014, during the conference Prophets, Viziers and Philosophers, held at the Freie Universität Berlin. I want to thank Regula Forster for all her work on this text and her precious advice and constructive suggestions. This publication is part of the research project Alchemy in the Making: From Ancient Babylonia via Graeco-Roman Egypt into the Byzantine, Syriac, and Arabic Traditions, acronym AlchemEast. The AlchemEast project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (G.A. 724914). 280 | Lucia Raggetti been the object of scholarly and non-scholarly attention. Julius Ruska, in 1926, included it in his anthology of early alchemical materials in Arabic. He studied the manuscript copy kept in what was, then, the ‘Preußische Staatsbibliothek’, namely Berlin, Staatsbibliothek – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Wetzstein II 1209, hereafter referred as ‘B’. Manfred Ullmann in his repertory of Arabo-Islamic natural and occult sciences mentions the work in the section on magical texts. Together with the Berlin manuscript, Ullmann mentions several other copies, and I was able to acquire the reproduction of two of them: the manuscript from the British Library, in the collection of the India Office (London, BL, India Office, 673) hereafter referred as ‘I’, and the one kept in the Escorial (El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, Arab. 947/1) hereafter referred to as ‘E’. In 1999, Ana Maria AlfonsoGoldfarb and Safa Abou Chahla Jubran published a translation based on the Escorial copy. The Arabic text is given in the form of a black-and-white photographic reproduction in an appendix to the book. Alfonso-Goldfarb also claims to have taken manuscript B into consideration, in order to embellish her translation into Portuguese. In 2010, an English version, translated by Nicholaj || 1 In the fifth section of his long essay, Julius Ruska offered the Arabic text together with a German translation of the Fundlegende, the incipits of Chaps 1–7 alongside a summary of part of their contents, and a synthetic description of Chaps 8–10. See Ruska 1926, 68–107. 2 Today ‘Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz’. See Ahlwardt 1887–1899, III, 541–542 (No. 4193). A digital reproduction of the manuscript is available at (accessed on 19 October 2020). 3 Ullmann 1972, 376. Several manuscripts mentioned by Ullmann and other scholars were impossible to obtain. The copy supposed to be in the Dār al-Kutub in Cairo, for instance, went missing long ago, and that there is no microfilm for the call number ḥurūf wa-asmāʼ 56. It was not possible either to include in the recensio the manuscript copies kept in Indian libraries, see Sezgin 1971, 103–104 and Stapleton 1936, 129. On the other hand, I came across two different manuscripts of the Persian versions of The Treasure of Alexander. The first reproduction that I received from the British Library was of a Persian manuscript, bearing the signature ‘Johnson Ms. 928’. On the first blank page, an uncertain hand added the title Ḏaḫīrat Skandar (sic) Risāla durr al-ḫawāṣṣ. The text, however, is not a complete translation from the Arabic version. It lacks the Fundlegende, and shares only parts of the contents, mainly those related to talismans (London, BL, India Office 928, fols 11–23). Emily Cottrell informed me that another copy of The Treasure was available online. It is a shorter version in Persian, which contains talismans that are not attested in other witnesses, see for instance Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, LJS 414, fol. 154 (, accessed on 19 October 2020). 4 See Loth 1877, 130–131. 5 See Derenbourg 1941, 76–78. 6 For Alfonso-Goldfarb, the composition of the work can probably be ascribed to some (pseudo-)Sabeans, and set in the third AH / ninth CE century. She presents the text as a manifesto The Treasure of Alexander – Stories of Discovery and Authorship | 281 de Mattos Frisvold and edited by Christopher Warnock, appeared in the nonscholarly series ‘Renaissance Astrology’. In spite of their heterogeneous appearance, the different textual materials included in The Treasure of Alexander share a technical character, and they all deal with the sciences of nature, as intended in the early Abbasid period. This type of compilation and juxtaposition required a strong and external narrative element that could justify and structure it. The device chosen to carry out this literary strategy is an introduction that explains the origin of the book and its rediscovery in the ninth century. The compilation is presented as a piece of antediluvian knowledge received by Alexander from his master Aristotle, put in writing in a golden book, and then hidden in order to avoid its disclosure to the unworthy. The book was left in anticipation of a king as wise as Alexander. A final paragraph, built on some elements from the longer introduction, completes the structure, creating the effect of a Ringkomposition. It seems unlikely that the relationship between The Treasure of Alexander and its sources follows a straight line. The frame story holds together a great number of erratic blocks of text, reorganised for this occasion into ten chapters. In some instances, the size of the block may correspond to an entire chapter, as in the case of the planetary seals. However, the sequence of the three sections on talismans (Chaps 5–7) contains two well-defined groups (Chap. 5 on planetary talismans, and Chap. 6 on healing talismans), whereas the third one collects miscellaneous talismans that did not fit properly into either of the two groups, but which were still worthy of mention. Within this miscellaneous group, are the two talismans prepared by Apollonius for two Syrian cities, which are recognisable as part of the Kitāb al-ṭalāsim al-kabīr (‘The Great Book of Talismans’), in which || of Oriental Hellenisation, marked by the hybridisation that is characteristic of Oriental sources (see Alfonso-Goldfarb and Jubran 1999, 33 and 105). 7 See Warnock 2010. 8 For the table of contents of The Treasure of Alexander, see Appendix 2. 9 The Sirr al-asrār has a similar composite introduction that counts many different voices. See Forster 2006, 48–55. For the manuscript tradition of the frame story, see B (fols 1–4), E (fols 1– 5), I (fols 1–5). 10 For the explicit in the manuscript tradition, see B (fol. 42), E (fols 60–61), I (fols 58–59). 11 In this way, Manfred Ullmann defines the genesis and the movement of erratic blocks: ‘When cultures meet and manifest themselves in great translating activities, it is customary to differentiate between two phases: one of reception and one of assimilation. In the phase of reception, which precedes in time, the foreign books are at first only translated; later, in the phase of assimilation, the translated texts themselves are independently worked into new books. But reception and assimilation may occur also at the same time and in one person.’ (Ullmann 1978, 24). 12 See Ullmann 1972, 380; and Raggetti 2019. 282 | Lucia Raggetti Apollonius tells us, in the first person, about his work as a wandering magician. The coherence of a textual block does not make its origin easier to recognise, nor is its thematic coherence a guarantee for a straightforward attribution to a source at all. For instance, a single and very coherent chapter may well be connected with different sources. As noted above, differences in the style and structure of some poison recipes suggest different sources for the preparations included in this section (Hermetic and non-Hermetic ones). There is also the case, however, in which the same textual block is attributed to a plurality of sources. The planetary talismans, for instance, are also transmitted under the name of ʿUṭārid b. Muḥammad and Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, and are also included in the larger recension of pseudo-Aristotle’s Book of Stones. In terms of the date of composition of The Treasure of Alexander, there is no argument strong enough to point to a precise date. Nevertheless, some textual clues hint at an early period, contemporary to or shortly after the translation movement. The overabundant combination of elements in the Fundlegende conv