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After Alexander, all trade was done in Koine Greek ("common" or "shared" Greek, pronounced "coin-ay"). It was the language of trade into the medieval times, lasting at least 900 years (the Byzantine empire used it until they were sacked by the Arabs in 1453). ...

There were three women alchemists early on, all famous. Mary Prophetess (or Maria the Jewess, among other names) was reported to be a gifted artificer of lab equipment, among them the hot water bath, or bain marie. Theosobia received letters from her brother Z...

Two papyri were discovered in Thebes, in Egypt from about 300 A.D. They were part of a trove of papyri, but two stood out: the Leyden Papyrus X ("ten"), and the Stockholm Papyrus, named for the museums housing them. Both are collections of chemical recipes. T...

There were many types of alchemy. The most entertaining are the wildly-descriptive allegories, and one of the best and earliest is the vision of Zosimos of Panopolis. Writing to his sister or student  Theosebia around 300 A.D. he describes the alchemical exper...

Gnosticism was a religious way of life, originating in Israel and Egypt just after the time of Christ. It's a blend of Christianity, platonic and Egyptian religions that could only have blended in Alexandria. It seems to have spread widely south of the Hebrew ...

No name is better known in alchemy than Hermes Trismegistus. His name is Hermes. Trismegistus is a title: "thrice magnificent," skilled in alchemy, astrology and natural magic. He has been described as being the Egyptian god Thoth (god of wisdom), as the Greek...

Stephanos of Alexandria wasn't really from nor lived in Alexandria. He was from Constantinople, in Byzantium (now Turkey). He only studied at Alexandria. He was a public speaker, and dabbled in alchemy. He taught Plato, Aristotle, mathematics, astronomy (proba...

The question is always asked in discussions of alchemy with students: given what the alchemists describe, can we duplicate their experiments? Rarely yes, mostly no. The first hinderance is that no one says what the starting material is. Some hint at dirt, so...

I keep an Alchemy Journal. It's like a Grail Diary but more notes and less exploration. I use Livescribe to keep and digitize the journal, and I can make a PDF of it. Here is that PDF. It's big, and it isn't all alchemy; some is history of science or the histo...

What of Roman alchemy? Rome was the inheritor of Greek thinking, and Rome had a close interaction with Ptolemaic Egypt when alchemy was discovered. Rome didn't give a hoot about alchemy. No mentions of alchemy, no documents, nothing whatever. As though it did...

Chinese alchemy is the first documented, but they always had their own version of alchemy. I don't understand it well (yet), but alchemy in China seems to be ingrained deeply into Daoist philosophies (body/spirit relationship) and medicine. The four elements ...

Alchemy on the India subcontinent was largely about health, medicine and longevity. It was tied in early with other healthful practices, like yoga. There are several ways to refer in Sanskrit to alchemy: Dhātuvāda: gold-making and silver-making Lohavāda: i...

The four-element theory combined with transmutation from Aristotle was adopted wholesale into medicine by the Greek doctor living in Rome, Galen of Pergamon (129 - 216 A.D.), in the form of "humors." Humors are fluids of the body: blood, phlegm, urine ("yello...

There is one YouTube channel which stands out for good alchemy discussion: ESOTERICA by Dr. Justin Sledge. He was trained as a philosopher (PhD, U Memphis) and is interested in Western Esoterica (Gnosticism, alchemy, magic, astrology, mysticism, Hermeticism, e...

By 600 A.D. Egypt was being run the Byzantine Roman empire (Constantine moved the seat of Roman rule to Byzantium in 330 A.D. and renamed it Constantinople). In 613, Mohammed started preaching, and the Muslim faith began to spread in Arabia. By 639 the Arabs w...

Of the many fascinating Arabic texts impinging on alchemy and science, I will only address a few here. All of them can be read, in my view, as commenting on Aristotle. Most extend Aristotle, some limit. In every case Aristotle is held in the highest esteem. K...

Jabir ibn Hayyan is a central figure in Arabic alchemy. Working from about 750 AD he also preserves the Greek alchemical thought but adds to it in several transforming ways. But there is a problem: he was so popular later in Europe that so many European alc...

Okay, I know it's hard to read so much. Here's the short version, as told by me: Mercury-Sulfur Theory Plato described the four elements in pairs, Fire/Earth and Air/Water. Aristotle changed the opposing pairs to Dry/Wet and Hot/Cold properties. Now, draw...

Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī is thought to have written a very important Arabic text, known in Latin as Turba Philosophorum. The title refers to an assembly of the philosophers, mostly the Miletian School philosophers Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Emped...

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī worked about 900 A.D. as a physician and alchemist. His primary work and fame comes from his work as a physician in describing diseases using the humor theory of Galen, pediatrics, and ophthalmology. He is from Iran, a ...