إسكندرية مصر - السيمياء .. الإسكندريه والسيمياء

Alexandria, Egypt - Alchemy .. Alexandria and Alchemy

Alexandria, Egypt

Alexandria, Egypt is a port located west of the mouth of the Nile at the Mediterranean Sea.

The ancient city was 4 miles long, and was built in a regular pattern with streets intersecting perpendicular to each other. Ptolemy, who was himself a student of Aristotle, quickly seized power in Egypt. While wars were raging in the rest of the Alexandrian empire - cities were plundered, libraries were destroyed, scholars were killed and scattered - Ptolemy built in Alexandria a center of learning for the Mediterranean and the Near East.

Alexandria, the cultural hybrid that Alexander intended, grew rich in the traditions of philosophy and practical knowledge. These two types of learning - philosophical and technical - blended in a way that even Alexander himself had not anticipated. They created a new kind of philosophical technique: alchemy (ancient chemistry - alchemy).

Alchemy

Alchemy refers to an Alexandrian practice (*), but the word actually has Arabic origins. The part “al” of the word is a definite article in Arabic, and alchemy is derived from “kimia,” a general word that refers to the practice of chemistry.

(*) Chemistry or alchemy has an ancient Egyptian origin, and the term is related to Egypt, as the ancient name of Egypt was Kemet, meaning black land - agricultural silt (references).

The origins of the word alchemy are not known. Some historians think that it comes from an Egyptian word meaning black, meaning the black soil of the Nile, or some kind of black magic, or it could mean the black powder used to apply kohl to the eyes and to resist the stinging bites of flies. Zosimus, an Alexandrian alchemist, suggested another possibility. He said that the word was given to mankind by angels who fell in love with earthly women. The authors of this book must reject this interpretation as historians, but as chemists they prefer it. Although the word alchemy emerged from the general word chemistry - meaning the technique of craftsmen - it came to refer to a branch of practical chemistry, which developed parallel to the technique of craftsmen. It was a very important branch, and the observations and technique of semiotics fed into practical chemistry - like medicine, metallurgy and art - but otherwise alchemy was important because it was a preliminary test of hypotheses. The subject of science is explanation and prediction, and Aristotle, after explaining matter, predicted transformation, that is, the change of one substance into another. This was the hypothesis that alchemists put to the test and continued to do so for the next thousand years.

Alchemists' opinions varied as to the purpose of the transformations. Most often the purpose was to produce gold, but it could also be medical or even to transform an old man into a young man or an earthly body into a spirit. The techniques of transformation also varied: some alchemists took a practical approach, melting, fusion, union, and distillation, but others used only magic spells.

Most used both. The rewards were great (gold and eternal life). Practitioners tried in every way to conceal their methods and results, making the practice full of secrecy, mystery, and strange occurrences at night. This made the public's awareness of alchemists less than good, while other alchemists, healers, miners, and craftsmen, sometimes got into trouble. But alchemy offered hope to the bewildered alchemists, and gave them the enthusiasm to stay in front of the fire when the potters and weavers had gone home.

Of course, from our enlightened perspective, the idea of ​​universal transformation may seem strange and bizarre, making us question the intelligence of our ancestors. But if we think carefully about alchemy as a first hypothesis, it is not entirely unreasonable.

The alchemists believed in transmutation because they saw it in their daily lives, in cooking, in dyeing, and in bodily functions such as the production of metals from ores. They also knew of the amazing transformation of mercury sulphide ore—cinnabar—into liquid mercury: heating the ore expelled something and left behind a pool of silvery metal. If that were not sufficient evidence of transmutation, then heating the metal again would suffice for the pool to turn into a red solid. This was not the return of cinnabar, as they had thought, but another oxide of mercury with the same red color. In the absence of additional information, transmutation becomes as plausible as any other explanation.

Moreover, when our early alchemical ancestors made a yellow or golden-colored powder, they had no reason to believe that it was not gold, so they decided that it was. As the techniques of analysis became better, they realized that the product was not gold, and because they had believed for generations that the process produced gold, they began to blame their own technique for the failure, not the recipe or formula.

Finally, the seemingly thankless and exhausting effort of the alchemists can be understood if we realize the great temptation to which they were exposed whenever they approached, so they imagined that the production of a yellow metal was almost the production of gold. Depending on their understanding, the product might be gold, but it was not as high as the material extracted from the earth. There were workers who fed their families by making the gold-like, which was not so bad as to fool even the craftsmen, as they said (1).