Arabic alchemists

The discovery of aqua regia by the Arab alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan (ad 720—813) provided a new extraction technology. Amalgamation of silver in ores with mercury was extensively used during the late fifteenth century by the Spaniards in Mexico and BoLvia. In 1861 the complex ores of the Comstock Lode, Nevada, were ground together with mercury, salt, copper sulfate, and sulfuric acid, and then steam-heated to recover the silver. 

It is not surprising that the word gibberish originally referred to texts written by the medieval Arabic alchemists Jabir, known in Latin as Geber. Many people find alchemy a daunting and confusing subject, and this impression is not entirely unfounded. Every alchemist explained his or her work in personal terms and symbols that were... 

Circa 950 The Arabic alchemist Mohammed ibn Umail was active. 

Arabic alchemy was unknown in the west until the eleventh century when the first translations from Arabic into Latin were made. Two Arab alchemists were especially well known and widely read Jabir ibn Hayyan, known to Europeans as Geber, and Abu Bakr ibn Zakariyya al-Razi, known as Rhazes. Of more than 2,000 pieces of writing attributed to Jabir, most were compiled by a Muslim religious sect called the Faithful Brethren or Brethren of Purity after he died. The works are written in different styles, which would indicate that they were penned by different authors. The compilation was completed around the year 1000, more than a hundred years after Jabir died. However, it has been established that the work translated into Latin under the title Summa Perfectionis was based on translations of Jabir s writing. Thus, although little is known about his life, we know something about the role Jabir played in the evolution of alchemical theory. 

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Emope, Greek and Arab texts were translated from Arabic into Latin, the literary language of Emope. The first translation of an alchemical book from Arabic, The Book of the Composition of Alchemy, was prepared by Robert of Chester in 1144 CE in Spain (31). To the Four Elements, air, water, fire, and earth, Arab alchemists added mercury and sulfur. Paracelsus considered mercury and strlfirr as principles along with salt... 

Jabir, or at least the school associated with him, made numerous contributions to laboratory practice, including refined techniques of distillation, the preparation of medicines, and the production of salts. The determination of Arabic alchemists to find the constituents of chemical substances led them to the discovery and use of strong reagents, chemically active substances used to test for the presence of a variety of other substances. They also developed theories to account for the action of those reagents. Acids, for example, could corrode a metal, a process that the alchemists interpreted as the separation of the metal into its constituents. When those constituents had been reduced to their elements, they were expected to work powerfully in producing the agents of transformation. If this were so, then analysis and subsequent synthesis could... 

Theory and practice were closely entwined for the Arabic alchemists of the eighth and ninth centuries. They asserted that every substance contained its opposite, in a hidden, or occult, way. Silver was cold and dry externally, but hot and wet internally. Gold was hot and wet externally, but cold and dry internally. In order to make gold one therefore needed to exchange the internal and external qualities of silver. 

Although chemistry has been important for millennia in its practical application to the needs and luxuries of human life, the discipline has not always been called chemistry. It has existed in very different forms, and in very different relations to neighboring sciences and crafts, in a flux that only accelerated as the years passed. The goals and concepts of a Chinese or Arabic alchemist of antiquity or the Middle Ages differed greatly from those of a chemist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, just as the aims and ideas of nineteenth-century research chemists were different from those of their predecessors and successors. 

The Bergbiichlein, for example, discussed the sulfur-mercury theory of the composition of metals, which Arabic alchemists introduced into alchemy. 

The first great Islamic alchemist is Jabir ibn Hayyan, known in Latin as Geber, and he is often cited as the greatest of all Arab workers in the art. Jabir was born in the town of Tus in Khorassan (near the modern city of Meshed) around the year 721, and may have lived for some time in the city of Kufa, on the western banks of the Euphrates. The young Jabir was educated by Bedouin, and also seems to have been a member of the Sufis, the mystical branch of Islam that rejected the luxuries of court life for an austere life of prayer, contemplation and ecstasy. Many prominent Arab alchemists — such as Jabir and Ibn Arabi — were Sufis, and their influence on the development of alchemy and the dissemination of alchemical ideas cannot be overestimated. 

Arab alchemist who was active in Moorish Spain. His Book of Silvery Water and Starry Earth became highly influential when it was translated into Latin as Tabula Chemica. Its authorship was ascribed to one Senior Zadith, who became, along with Geber, an important name in mediaeval Western alchemy. 

Known as the Prince of Physicians , Avicenna was an Arab alchemist and doctor. He refuted the possibility of transmutation, believing that alchemical gold was merely a clever imitation... 

Above Arab symboBc figures and diagrams of stills (on the right) from a 12th-century Arab text on alchemy. In gener the Arab alchemists were less secretive about their discoveries, and the Arab manuscripts are less shrouded in complicated symbolism than the later European chemical works. 

Like his predecessor, the Arabian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (sometimes known as Jabir), al-Razi was influenced in his alchemical views by Aristotle s theory of the four elements. Arabic alchemists had modified the Aristotelian system with respect to the composition of minerals, whereby two elements, mercury and sulfur, were responsible for the mercnrial and sulfurous principles of a given substance. Later called philosophical Mercury and Sulfur, these elements (or principles) were thought to be the substances from which all metals were formed. This Sulfur-Mercury theory later became highly influential among European thinkers, for example, Isaac Newton. To this Sulfur and Mercury, al-Razi added a third constituent, a salty principle (which was later reproposed by Paracelsus). In al-Razi s opinion metals were comprised of particles of these elemental constituents, while the identity of the metal depended on the relationships between these indivisible particles and the empty spaces between them. 

The discovery of citric acid is often credited to the Arab alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan (721-815), also known by his... 

Also about the middle of the 12th century the production of alcohol, via the distillation of fermented substances, was discovered in Salerno. The infiuence of the Arab alchemists was strong in southern Italy see Figure 4), and many of their writings were being translated into Latin. 

C.E., almost no chemistry was done in Europe. Instead, the study of chemistry, or alchemy, shifted to the Middle East. Probably the most influential Arab alchemist was Jabir ibn Hayyan (ca. 760-ca. 815). Jabir is best known for his studies of the transmutation of metals (converting one metal into another metal). Jabir thought mercury was the ideal metal because mercury is a liquid, it can be purified more completely... 

The most important of the medieval alchemists, however, is not known by name, for he wrote under that of Geber, the Arabic alchemist of six centuries before. Nothing is known of this false Geber except that he was probably a Spaniard and wrote about 1300. He was the first to describe sulfuric acid, the most important single substance used by the chemical industries of today (after water, air, coal, and oil). He also described the formation of strong nitric acid. These acids were obtained from minerals, while the earlier known acids, such as the acetic acid of vinegar, came from the world of life. 

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