THE BABYLONIAN ORIGIN OF ALCHEMY

ON THE RECENT DISCOVERY OF CHEMICAL RECIPES ON CUNEIFORM TABLETS.


Robert Eisler


HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS REVIEW
FORTY-FIRST VOLUME
(New Series.—Volume XV)
JUNE 1926


Our knowledge of the origins of chemistry has just taken a big step forward, perhaps a decisive step. The oldest documents of alchemical literature, known to Kopp (1), Berthelot (2) and Lippmann (3), only date back to the 3rd century AD. They were two Greek papyri (one preserved in Leyden, the other in Stockholm), discovered in 1828 in an Egyptian priestly tomb near Thebes, containing recipes from Egyptian founders. They were published by Leeman in 1885 and by Lagercrantz in 1913. The Coptic treatise published by Stern (4) is of no earlier date, and so far no Egyptian sources have been found prior to these documents.

As the alchemical literature is all permeated with astrological ideas, Berthelot and Lippmann presumed that there could also be Babylonian sources, although no documents on this subject were possessed. The situation is now quite different. Professor H. Zimmern, has learned Assyriologist from the University of Leipzig, and his colleague MB Landsberger, by deciphering tablets in cuneiform writing which come from the library of King Assurbanipal (668-626 BC), at Nineveh, and are deposited in the British Museum, have discovered a series of texts having the character of chemical recipes, in particular for the manufacture of enamels and artificial gemstones. One of these fragments had already been published separately by the French Assyriologist, M. Virolleaud, in cuneiform script,A chemical recipe ( Babyloniaca , III, 221). The others had been copied with great care by the young American scholar G.-V. Schick, of Concordia College, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In his great work on Babylonia and Assyria, the second volume of which has just appeared (5), Mr. Bruno Meissner, professor in Berlin, reproduces and translates some of these texts from the copy of Mr. Schick, which Mr. Zimmern had communicated to him for this purpose. However, the need being felt for a comprehensive publication, Mr. Zimmern and a scholar of Oxford (Merton College), MR Campbell Thompson, agreed to carry it out simultaneously, but each on his own. Both works appeared in 1925, that of Zimmern in an article in the Zeitschrift f. Assyriology (NF, t. II, XXXV): Assyrische chemisch-technische Rezepte , that of Thompson in one work: On the Chemistry of the Ancient Assyrians(London, 1925, 1 vol. in-fol., 158 p. with 6 plates). Allow the author of these lines, who is specifically called upon, by his duties in the service of the League of Nations, to promote international intellectual cooperation, to point out to the French public this singular Anglo-German match and to briefly comment on the results (6), which the reader would certainly have preferred to find in a single work, the fruit of a happy collaboration between the two eminent scholars (7).

The texts published in Babylonian transcription and in German and English translations include about forty fragments, representing the value of about 300 lines. They formed a compendium of chemistry and metallurgy entitled La Porte du Four. The word gate must be taken metaphorically as well as in the titles of the Talmudic treatises Baba kama, Baba mesia —here it means introduction, initiation. This title calls for comparison with the alchemy work of the thirteenth century, attributed to the Arab Geber and published by M. Darmstaedter (Berlin, 1922), Liber fornacum, the Book of Furnaces.

Here is the translation of the first cuneiform fragment (8):

“If you want to lay the foundations of a stone (= ore) kiln, choose an appropriate day in a favorable month and lay the foundations of the kiln. As soon as the kiln has been oriented and you have set to work, place the divine embryos in the chapel of the kiln — no other crucible must enter it, no impure (thing) must be placed in front of them — pour out before them the ordinary sacrifice. If you want to put the stone in the oven, offer a sacrifice in front of the divine embryos, place a casserole dish with cypress, sprinkle fermented drink (kurunnu), light a fire under the oven, and then introduce the stone into the oven. The people whom you will admit near the oven must first purify themselves, and only then you can let them approach the oven.(mulberry?), a peeled stump (quru), which was not part of a raft (bundle of trunks held in place by a strap), and which was cut in the month of ab ; it is this wood that must be used under your oven. »

We will first notice the choice of the favorable day. We find this prescription among the Hellenistic alchemists: according to Pammenes (9), it is the Egyptian month of pharmuti which is appropriate for the Great Work; in Olympiodorus, this month is precisely called mensis philosophicus (10). Similarly, in the Sumerian calendar of Nippur, there is a month for tiles and a month for lighting fires (11).

The prescriptions relating to the purifications are obligatory for all the magic operations and do not have anything extraordinary. The oven must be oriented, that is to say placed in such a way that its axes are directed, like those of a temple, towards the cardinal points. For the Hellenistic alchemists, the metals and the four elements had a mystical relationship with the four corners of the world (12). But independently of these cosmological considerations, it is obvious that an oven built in the open air, like the one mentioned in our text, and which is not activated by a bellows, must have its opening facing west, from where the prevailing wind comes (13).

But what is most remarkable is the mention of embryos (or abortions). Mr. Meissner had not been able to explain this unexpected term. Perhaps remembering Faust, he translated: … offers a sacrifice to the deified homunculi, protectors of chemistry . But I think we have to look for a completely different interpretation. These are in no way real human fetuses, preserved in any way to serve as fetishes or patrons of the founders, nor introduced into the oven as cooking material. It is, in my opinion, the ore itself, it is the mineral ingredients to be melted that qualify as embryos or runts.

It will suffice, I believe, to bring together a few texts to establish this assertion. The Greek alchemist and high priest Comarius (14) writes: A male principle (in Greek arsenikon, from which comes the name of the arsenic body) must combine with a female principle ( ie a raw material, a virgin earth ) (15) for an embryo to be produced . As by the warmth of the mother's body the fruit of her womb grows, comes out, and finally is nourished with breast milk, so the philosopher ripens the fruit of his labor at a gentle fire and nourishes it with the celestial waters (16 )

According to Pseudo-Democritus and John de Euagia (17), the Great Work is quite similar to childbirth, only its duration is nine hours, instead of nine months, during which certain planetary influences can cause abortions or miscarriages that destroy the embryo (18).

This process is even better described by Zosimus the Panopolitan (19): “In themselves copper, lead, magnesia, etc., are dead, but they greedily wed with each other, which begets new life; an embryo is born, the development of which lasts nine months, provided that no abortion occurs; but this duration can also be shortened by more intense heat. As a being is formed in the womb by the combination of the cooled menstrual blood and the hot semen, things also happen in the Great Work, only here the product resists fire (20). »

If all goes well, the adept sees a little man (in Greek anthroparion, in Latin homunculus) coming out of the altar; first the copper homunculus, dressed in red, which is transformed by bathing in black liquor into a man of silver; the latter appears all incandescent in the fire… finally he becomes “the golden man” (21).

We see from these texts in what sense we must understand embryos in the ancient Assyrian recipe. These embryos are simply the ores, the mineral ingredients of the cast iron.

It should be noted after that that the word which means embryo in our text (kubu) is always preceded by the particle an which means divine, celestial. Why would ores be called celestial? In a recent article on The Terminology of the Jewish Alchemists ( Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums , 1925, pp. 364-371), I showed how the Ancients, having observed falls of ferric meteorites, had conceived the idea of ​​an iron sky, pieces of which could break off. In Sumerian and Egyptian, iron is called "celestial metal"; and it is probable that the Greek word image of untranscribed text (brazen) derives from the Chaldean (or Chalybian) hal-hi which also meanscelestial . What was well known about iron alone was extended by analogy to other metals. A later work of the imagination gave rise to the belief in several skies of different metals, a copper skies, a silver skies, etc. For the precious metals that were found in their native state, in nuggets, they were considered to have detached themselves from the celestial vault and had fallen to earth in the state of shooting stars.

However, stony and non-metallic meteorites also often fall; on the other hand, experience teaches that from an ore which has all the appearance of a rough stone, a pure metal can be obtained by fusion. From these two observations was born the belief that these stones, these minerals were unfinished, premature products, in other words celestial embryos or abortions, which the heat of fire, the smoke of incense, the sprinkling by nutritive liquids and other magical practices, were capable of developing artificially, of maturing, of bringing to term.

If therefore kubu (embryo, abortion, miscarriage) is the technical term to designate the ore, the unfinished ingredient, destined to be melted down, everything is easily explained. M. Thureau-Dangin ( Revue assyriologique , 19, 83) has already noted the fact that the raw material, the raw material of the potter and the modeler is regarded as the embryo of the finished pottery; the mass of clay is called the potters' egg by the rabbis. There is obviously an animist or biological way of conceiving technical operations. Similarly, the word kuru , which recurs several times in the enamel recipes of the Porte du Four, means in Aramaic, as well as a smelting oven ,a crucible , female sexual organ, womb . We see that this metaphor is directly related to that of the embryo-mineral (22).

Moreover, this equivocation of the embryo-mineral existed for a very long time in the works of the alchemists and consequently also in their minds. Proof of this is the following curious example (23). It is a letter received around 1798 by the Hermetic Society , whose founders, Kortum and Behrens, mystified more than one naive person. This letter came from a follower, resident of Eisenach. This madman had gone to great lengths to obtain a product of miscarriages, and as his efforts remained fruitless, he applied to the Hermetic Societyand asked him how we could obtain this raw material. He expresses himself in a very hermetic style, in the following parabolic way (after having however designated the object in question in a fairly clear way, and having attached, for greater certainty, a pencil sketch): the mines throw it then, without thinking of evil, and that most often when the people who are hunting it are not present . In this way, the noble metal is usually thrown into the manure, out of ignorance. So I see it's not so easy to get, especially not every day. This is why I address an earnest prayer to the dear Society, so that it will kindly honor me with an answer and tell me how this object would be to be drawn from our own mines without damage or danger.(He is simply asking for a harmless abortifacient for his own wife.)

The difficulty of obtaining real fetuses could not be less great in Babylon, where they were buried under the thresholds of houses to serve as lucky charms, than in Eisenach where, in the Age of Enlightenment, they were thrown in the garbage. I cannot believe that it would have been possible to obtain for each firing of enamels or for each melting of an alloy—the recipes are always given for very small quantities—several real fetuses. In addition, it must have been difficult to obtain, with wood only, without coal, a sufficient temperature for fusion. It is obvious that the introduction of masses of flesh in the oven would have caused a thick smoke which would have disturbed the whole operation. If the prescription that nothing impure should approach the oven applies to anything,

Our text has therefore become clearer little by little: “As soon as the furnace has been oriented on its foundations, place the embryos there (that is to say the ingredients of the cast iron), spread before them the sacrifices (that is to say the divine alcohols which will nourish the embryo and effect the maturation of the mixture). And when you place the stone (ie the ore in question) in the oven, it will still be necessary to spread a fermented drink (ie an alcohol which will cause a lively flame at the time of ignition). »

If the obscure cuneiform document of the seventh century BC sheds light on the writings of the Greco-Egyptian gold makers who postdate it by almost a thousand years, this proves inversely that alchemy in Hellenistic Egypt (like astrology at the same time) is closely related to Babylonian models. The magi of the Persian sovereigns who, since Cambyses, governed Egypt, then those of the Greek diadochi of the Seleucid kingdom, the Ostanes and Komarios, must have served as organs of transmission.

There are also other striking coincidences. The Egyptians divided the sky into 36 sectors, corresponding to 36 main stars called decans (stars of decadic weeks) and certain animals or divinities. The vestibule of the Egyptian temple of Dendera, which dates from the beginning of the imperial period, is decorated with a decadic circle on which several metals and minerals also correspond to the decan stars. We must compare this to the cuneiform texts of the British Museum which attribute silver to the god Anou (the sky), gold to the god Enlil (the air), copper to the god Ea (water), tin to the god Nin-a-mal (the god of the waters considered as a blacksmith). On another cuneiform tablet, certain plants and precious stones are attributed to certain stars.

I have already alluded, in connection with our cuneiform work La Porte du Four, to the Liber fornacum of the middle ages. This last work begins with an instruction on how to build the furnaces, then gives a series of instructions for the treatment of metals. Likewise, alongside the cuneiform tablets entitled the Gate of the Furnace, there must have existed a collection of other Gates, that of copper, that of silver, gold, etc., where the symbolic term gate signified not only introduction (to the preparation of gold, silver, etc.), but also the passage which the metallic embryo must cross in order to rise to the higher stage of transformation.In the Persian — and Babylonian — mysteries of Mithras, the idea of ​​progression through the seven gates of the seven metals plays a large role. This fits perfectly with Dream of the Seven Gates which is mentioned in a writing attributed to the Persian Ostanes, a writing which no longer exists except in Arabic, and to the fact that the secret of the alchemical transmutation of metals is often referred to as the "Great Mystery of Mithras". Indeed, in the cult of this Iranian savior-god, one of the main ceremonies featured a symbolic passage of the soul through the seven successive doors of the seven spheres of heaven, while ancient metallurgy used a furnace with seven successive chapels communicating with each other through seven successive openings.

Among the cuneiform tablets with which we are concerned, there is by chance no fragment concerning the preparation of gold, but there are recipes for certain preparations of copper and silver. Finally, there are found, as in the known Greco-Egyptian papyri, recipes for the manufacture of artificial precious stones, that is to say colored glass and enamels. Here is one:

“If you want to prepare a light blue enamel, grind separately then mix 10 mines of immanaku stone, 15 mines of ash of laundry grass, 1, 2/3 mines of white grass (?); places the mixture in the oven with four eyes (openings), and then pushes it between the eyes, lights a low fire which does not smoke; as soon as the mass is red-white, take it out, let it cool, grind it again, form it into a heap on pure salt, place it in the cold chapel oven, make a low smokeless fire; as soon as the mass is orange-red, … for it over the baked brick. Its name is then light blue enamel (24). »

Here is another similar recipe:

“With 1 lead of fine enamel, take 1/3 lead of crushed busu stone, 1/3 lead of amnaku, 5 half-shekels of mother-of-pearl, grind everything again, pile it up in a shape, place it between the eyes of the kiln; it will produce a blue powder enamel (25). »

Undoubtedly, we have here the formulas of the oldest recipes for the manufacture of these wonderful enamels and these enamelled bricks whose colors and metallic reflections are still admired by connoisseurs and collectors of Persian earthenware.

We know that all glass and enamels result from the fusion of salt with sand, according to the expression of Merret, the oldest theorist of the art of glassmakers, or, to speak more scientifically, are combinations of silica, alumina and potash or soda, to which lime and lead are added, depending on the case. It must therefore be admitted that, in the recipes that we have just quoted, the untranslated words (immanaku, amnaku) designate sands or siliceous rocks or clay soils. The alkali, soda and potash were supplied by the ashes of grass or seaweed, the lime by calcined shells. As for the vitrifiable colors used by the Babylonians, they have been determined by the chemical analysis of enamel fragments. A yellow is known which is identical to Naples yellow (lead antimonate);blue is a salt of copper with the addition not of cobalt, but of lead; red is copper suboxide, etc. (26). The crucibles and cast iron residues that have been found attest that these enamels were indeed prepared on site and not imported from elsewhere. At Khorsabad they even found a lump of earth weighing about a kilogram, which on closer examination revealed to be powdered blue enamel.

The art of preparing these coloring and vitrifiable materials of all kinds, which according to the evidence of excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia knew very well, certainly dates back thousands of years. But it would be important to know when we first had the idea of ​​writing the recipes for this art, that is to say to what date the technological literature dates back. We still lack the reference points necessary to answer this question, but it is already something to be able to say that the library of King Assurbanipal, in the seventh century BC, contained at least one work on alchemy or metallurgical and ceramic chemistry, which represents the oldest known term of a long series of similar documents.

The importance of this discovery, from the point of view of the general history of mankind, cannot be overestimated. I will only recall that the Greek Hesiod, roughly contemporary with Assurbanipal, represents the successive stages of the development of humanity, like metallic ages: golden age, silver age, bronze age, iron age. Likewise in the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar ( Book of Daniel , II, 31), the successive empires and the peoples who had hegemony in the East are represented as races of metal: a race of gold is followed by a race of silver, then a race of copper and a race of iron.In the end will come a race which is scornfully designated as a bad casting, of iron mixed with clay — the result of the breaking of a crucible — which will in its turn be destroyed by a race of stone. But the most remarkable in this passage is the grandiose vision of a colossal statue, whose golden head represents the Assyrians, the silver chest the Medes (27), the bronze belly and thighs the Persians, the legs of iron the Greeks, the feet of iron and clay the mixed people of the Seleucid kingdom. The entire statue represents humanity (28), which is therefore conceived as a single body, of which the various peoples are the members. This immediately brings to mind the famous parable of Menenius Agrippa ( Livy, 2, 10) who, to appease social struggles in Rome, compares the different classes of the state to the head, stomach, hands and feet of a living being. There is on the other hand a Persian tradition according to which the seven metals come from seven parts of the body of the first man, and an Arab tradition relating to an idol of the Harranians composed of seven different metals. Finally, according to a Hindu myth ( Rigveda , X, 90) on the origin of castes, these come from the members of the cosmic body of primitive man (purusha): from his face come the Brahmans, from his arms the nobles (Kchatryas), from his legs the Vaysias (merchants, etc.), from his feet the Soudras (the pariahs).

Another tradition relating to the same object is that which Plato reports in his Republic (414. B) as being a Phoenician tale, that is to say an oriental myth, which he would like, moreover, to impose as an article of faith on the citizens of his ideal State, in order to inculcate in them the conviction that the social order was established by nature or by God: men would have been formed in the depths of the maternal womb of the Earth and then born in the light; but the god who engendered them mixed gold in the substance of which he formed the ephors, silver in the mold of the warriors, copper in that of the peasants, iron in that of the artisans. Who now sees only in the mind of Plato, as in that of Hesiod, the memory of a myth still floated: this idea of ​​embryos in metal, formed in the earth by the fertilizing seed, the blood or the ferment of a god,homunculi in gold, in silver, in copper, in lead, of ancient oriental alchemy, which is itself only a more refined, more scientific form, so to speak, of the myth of humanity formed by Bel or by Marduk with the earth and the blood of the gods?

It has not been noticed so far that Plato, in the passage quoted, expressly refers to a prediction, paradoxical in appearance, according to which the State will go to ruin when iron or brass protect it, a formula which has all the appearance of one of those sibylline oracles of which Heraclitus already spoke (Diels, Fragm. 92 ) . It is not armor of iron or brass that Plato means — for how could it destroy the State? — but the oracle declares that the State will be ruined if it is delivered up to the direction and protection of the men of iron and copper, that is to say, of the despised class of manual workers.

This expression agrees entirely with a remarkable passage from the prophet Jeremiah (VI, 27):

I had established you as assayer (of metal) of my people,
as an examiner, that you may know and fathom their conduct.

They are all... of brass and iron...

The bellows are hot, the lead is consumed by fire;
it is in vain to try to purify, purify,
the slag does not come off.

They are called despicable money,
for the Lord has rejected them.

The same image is found in a few biting verses of Aristophanes' Frogs (c. 718 to 733), where the aristocratic poet first laments the present depreciation of Athenian silver coinage, which is increasingly supplemented with copper, and which has driven the old good coinage out of circulation. And he adds ironically: “It is exactly in the same way that democracy has chased people of good quality from their offices and dignities and handed over power to the red men, to the copper men. It seems from this that Aristophanes would also have known the oracle quoted by Plato and the Phoenician legend of the different classes of society: the men of gold, those of silver, copper, etc.

In any case, the sources from which Hesiod and Plato drew, the parable of Menenius Agrippa, the vision of Daniel, and perhaps also the mention reported by Lippmann (op. cit., p. 304) of a statue of a Harranian divinity composed of the seven metals, must all be considered from the same point of view: the whole of humanity (in Daniel and in the Rigveda), the State (in Menenius, Aristophanes and Plato), are considered like a living individual, the different peoples or classes, like their members, cast in different metals . And the head – in Menenius it is perhaps rather the belly – is regarded as the dominant part, the egemonikon of the Stoics.

But this singular image is itself subject, like the metallic homunculi of the alchemists, to magical transmutation in divine fire. Fondeurs know well that certain ingredients which were at the top in the crucible first fall to the bottom, and that others can rise from the bottom. Gold does not always remain at the head, nor iron at the feet; in the successive ages of humanity the other metals, silver, copper, iron also rise in their turn. When gold falls, a base metal takes over humanity or the state. The end of peoples and the death of humanity comes, according to Plato's oracle, when copper and iron, that is to say when workers and peasants, hold power.

ROBERT EISLER. Translated from German by Robert BOUVIER.


NOTES

(1) Die Alchemie in alterer und neuerer Zeit , 2 vols., Heidelberg, 1886.

(2) Collection of ancient Greek alchemists , Paris, 1888. Introduction to the study of the chemistry of the Ancients , etc., Paris, 1889.

(3) Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie , Berlin, 1919

(4) Zeitschr. f. aegyptische Sprache , vol. XXII, p. 102.

(5) Babylonian and Assyrian , Heidelberg, 1920-1925, 2 vols. in-8, with 223 reproductions of tablets and 3 maps.

(6) See also:
R. EISLER, Die chemische Terminologie der Babylonier . Zeitschr. für Assyriologie , 1926, p. 1-12; And
R. EISLER, Der babylonische Ursprung der Alchemie , Chemiker Zeitung , 1925, no. 83, p. 577-578, no. 86, p. 602.

(7) Rebus sic stantibus , it is essential to have the two works in view, because Mr. Zimmern gives fragments of copies unknown to Mr. Thompson (and vice versa) while the study of the originals made in the British Museum by MM. Thompson and Gadd made it possible to recognize the connection of certain fragments between them better, than Mr. Zimmern had been able to judge from the copies of Leipzig.

(8) ZIMMERN, s. quoted, p. 183. For certain corrections, see my article quoted p. 6, no. 2.

(9) LIPPMANN, p. 48

(10) Ibid., p. 99.

(11) F. HOMMEL, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics , III, 74 b.

(12) G. SCHOLEM, Monatschr. for Geschichte u. Wissensch. des Judentums , t. LXIX, p. 21.

(13) One of the published fragments (II, § 27, Zimmern, art. quoted p. 120) which unfortunately has many gaps, bears the words: ana sâru, towards the North. This shows that orientation considerations found a place in these foundry recipes.

(14) LIPPMANN, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie , Berlin, 1919, p. 52 - The author is perhaps thinking of copper (metal of Cypris, or Venus) which, melted with arsenic, forms a white alloy having the appearance of silver.

(15) See for the history of this expression: R. EISLER, Orpheus und Orp hisch Dionysisches , Leipzig, 1925, p. 146.

(16) BERTHELOT, Collection of Greek alchemists , II, p. 293.

(17) LIPPMANN, ibid., p. 70.

(18) BERTHELOT, ibid., II, p. 266.

(19) LIPPMANN, p. 80.

(20) BERTHELOT, p. 226.

(21) Ibid., p. 117.

(22) This is not an isolated fact: in Hindu, the hearth altar (vedi) is feminine, fire (agni) is masculine, and yoni (vulva) is integral with altar. In the folk tradition of Greece and Germany, the womb is called the bread oven, hence the popular saying that all men were baked in the same mold. It's the same animist conception that compares amalgam alloys and chemical combinations to a marriage. The Babylonians already distinguished between certain minerals which are male and others which are female. Even today, jewelers speak of male stones and female stones, the former being those with a more intense colour, the latter with a paler colour.

(23) Hermann KOPP, Die Alchemie , Heidelberg, 1886, II, p. 296.

(24) Porte du Four , I, § 1, ZIMMERN, art. quoted, p. 183.

(25) Ibid., II, § 4, p. 195.

(26) LAYARD, Nineveh and Babylon , p. 166. W. ANDRAE, Assur. Farbige Keramik , p. 4. MEISSNER, op., cit. p. 385.

(27) Originally, the Hittites, whose name the Babylonians wrote with the ideograms “men of money”, as we speak of Argentines today.

(28) Tenisetu, avelutu in Babylonian. It is remarkable that the Greek language has no word for humanity.