ANCIENT EASTERN ORIGINS

Knowledge of the ancient art of alchemy appears to have filtered into Europe in the twelfth century through Latin translations of Arabic texts such as Robert of Chester's Liber de compositione alchemiae (Book of the Composition of Alchemy). Moorish Spain, and especially the intellectual centre, Toledo, served as the major distribution point for the accumulated knowledge of the Islamic alchemists who had added their distinctive imprint to the wisdom of sages practising and writing in China, India, Egypt and Greece. Closely associated, therefore, with Islam's incursions into Christendom, alchemy was bound to be regarded with suspicion in Europe. Yet this perceived origin also prompted admiration. For one thing, Eastern metallurgy, and other crafts dependent on sophisticated techniques of practical chemistry, such as glass-making, dyeing, tinting and goldsmithery, were the envy of the Western world. Indeed, alchemy's particularly close association with metallurgy led the historian of chemistry John Read to propose that the art sprang up among the ‘skilled metal-workers of the Middle East, possibly in Mesopotamia, whence it spread westwards to Egypt and Greece, and eastwards along the caravan routes to India and China’.