Alchemical Equipment in the Eleventh Century, A.D. 

 (With one plate). 



By H. E. Stapleton, B.A., B.Sc, (Oxon), Indian Educational Service, and R. F. Azo, 

 Instructor in Arabic, Board of Examiners Office, Fort William. 



[Read August 2nd, 1905.] 



Contents. 



Page 

 I. Introduction 47 



II. Analysis of the < Ainu-s-§an' , ah 51 



III. Arabic Text 65 



Introduction. 



In another paper l by one of the authors a list is given of the commoner substances 

 that were employed by Greek alchemists of the 3rd century A.D. in their experiments on the 

 preparation of gold and silver. The main object in inserting this list was to emphasise 

 the absence of the particular substance whose history was being dealt with ; but a 

 secondary reason for its compilation was the discovery that the writer had just made of the 

 treatise that will now be described. As this treatise summarises the equipment of a Persian 

 alchemist in the first half of the 1 ith century, the present paper and the earlier portion 

 of the preceding paper may be regarded as largely interdependent, each forming a 

 commentary on the other. 



The present treatise is entitled iULa/l ^y^ £*LaJ! ^c 'Ainu-s-San'a/i wa 'Aunu-s- 

 Sana'ah (Essence of the Art and Aid to the Workers) and was written at Baghdad in the year 

 426 A.H. (=1034 A.D.) by one Abu-1-Hakim Muhammad ibn 'Abdil-1-Malik as-Salihi 

 al-Khwarazmi al-Kathi for his patron Ar-Ra'is Abu-1-Hasan 'Ali ibn 'Abdillah. Neither 

 author nor patron seems to be alluded to in the ordinary biographical sources of 

 reference, 2 but a study of the contents of the treatise makes it clear that there can be little 

 doubt as to the accuracy of the date mentioned. The florid style of the author's 

 Introduction, with its ten poetical quotations in less than three and a half pages, is typical of 

 the loss in simplicity that characterises Arabic writings of the 10th and 1 ith centuries, while 

 the verses that occur at the beginning of Chapter I are completely parallelled by an extract 

 from the works of Abu Ahmad ibn Abi Bakr al-Katib (c. 925 A.D. ; oi.postea, p. 50, note (2)) 

 quoted in Tha'alibi's Yatimatu-d- Dahr. The chief argument, however, in support of the 

 date is the fact that the l Ainu- s- San' an can be annotated, in all its essential points, from five 

 contemporary sources of alchemical information. These are (a) the Rasa Hoi the Ikhwdnu- 

 s-Safa (' Brethren of Purity '), written c. 970 A.D. ; (b) the Fihrist of Ibn Abi Ya'qub 

 an-Nadim, written 988 A.D. ; (c) the second volume (on Drugs) of the Qanun of 

 Ibn Sina. (Avicenna), written c. 102 1; (d) two Syrio- Arabic treatises now in the British 



1 Memoirs A.S.B. I, pp. 25-41. 



* E.g., Tia'alibT, Yaqut, Ibnu-1-Ajhjr, Ibn Abi U?aibi'ah, Ibn Khallikan, Haji Khalfa, and Brockelmann. 



Mem. A.S.B. 2-11=05, 



