The Alembic: Chemistry Gets a Bench
The Islamic Golden AgeThe Still Was Already Old
The alembic did not begin in Baghdad. Around 300 CE, in the Egyptian town of Panopolis, a Greco-Egyptian writer named Zosimos described vessels of glass and copper for driving vapour off a heated substance and catching it as liquid again, including a three-armed still he credited to an earlier figure, Maria the Jewess. His word for the head of the apparatus was ambix. Arabic took it in as al-anbiq, and English later took that as alembic. What the ninth and tenth centuries changed was not the idea but the supply and the habit. Workshops from Iraq to Egypt had glassmakers who could blow a cucurbit and its long-necked head to order, and archaeologists still lift fragments of those vessels out of Islamic-era sites.
The Books Are Signed. That Is the Problem.
The workbench's most famous books carry the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan, a chemist of Kufa who by tradition died around 815. The corpus under that name runs to some six hundred separate titles, around two hundred of which survive, far more than one working life. Since Paul Kraus's study in the early 1940s, most historians have concluded that the bulk of it was written by several hands roughly between 850 and 950, a century or so after the man himself. Fuat Sezgin and others have argued that a genuine eighth-century core survives inside it, and the question is not settled. The doubt is not a modern invention either. When the Baghdad bookseller Ibn al-Nadim catalogued the titles in 987, he had to answer readers who said Jabir had never existed at all.
Greek Bones, New Materials, and a Balance
The theory in these books is Greek at the root. Aristotle had two exhalations rising inside the earth, one smoky and dry, one vaporous and moist, the moist one forming the metals and the dry one the stones. Arabic writers recast these as sulphur and mercury, combining in different proportions to make every metal. The theory is first attested in the Secret of Creation ascribed to Balinas, and the Jabirian books took it up and carried it; it underpinned European alchemy into the seventeenth century. To that inherited frame they add materials with no clear counterpart in the Greek sources, above all sal ammoniac, which joins mercury, sulphur and arsenic among the volatile "spirits". They also promise a Balance: every substance expressed in exact numerical proportions of hot, cold, wet and dry. It reads like quantification. But the numbers come out of a scheme of alphabet letters built around the number seventeen, not off a scale.
Al-Razi's Bench
For an author who is certainly one person, go to Abu Bakr al-Razi, the physician of Rayy who died around 925. His Book of Secrets opens like an inventory. Substances first: the minerals sorted into bodies, spirits, stones, vitriols, boraxes and salts, with vegetable and animal materials handled separately. Then the apparatus, in two groups: tools for melting metals, and tools for everything else, among them furnaces, crucibles, cucurbits and still-heads, flasks, filters, a sand bath and a water bath. Then procedures, written as instructions a reader could actually repeat, with no allegory to decode first. He did believe metals could be transmuted. Al-Kindi, in Baghdad a generation earlier, had written that they could not, and al-Razi wrote a book answering him. The era argued with itself.
Four Words, and What They Prove
Alembic, alkali, elixir, alcohol all reached English through Arabic, and they are honest evidence of where Europe got its glassware and its vocabulary. They prove less than they are usually asked to. Al-qily was plant ash for glass and soap. Al-iksir came into Arabic from a Greek word for a dry wound powder. Al-kuhl was ground eye cosmetic, and only drifted through Latin, powder to essence, into meaning spirit of wine; Arabic writers do describe distilling wine, though whether they concentrated it is disputed, and the unmistakable burning spirit turns up in twelfth-century Italy. The traffic west was tangled too. A translation dated February 1144 carried an Arabic alchemical book into Latin, but the "Geber" Europe admired most, the Summa perfectionis, was written in Latin around 1300, probably by Paul of Taranto. The same signature problem, running the other way.
Key Dates to Remember
- c. 300 CE — Zosimos of Panopolis, in Roman Egypt, describes distillation apparatus in Greek, including the ambix that gives the alembic its name.
- c. 815 — Traditional death date of Jabir ibn Hayyan of Kufa, the name attached to the era's most famous chemical writings.
- c. 850-950 — The period to which most historians since Paul Kraus date the bulk of the Jabirian corpus: after Jabir's lifetime, and by several hands.
- c. 925 — Death of al-Razi, whose Book of Secrets sets out substances, apparatus and repeatable procedures under a single, certain author.
- 987 — Ibn al-Nadim catalogues Jabir's titles in Baghdad and defends him against readers who denied he had ever lived.