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The ("Book of the Composition of Alchemy"), also known as the ("Testament of Morienus"), the , or by its Arabic title ("Khalid's Questions to the Monk Maryanos"), is a work on alchemy falsely attributed to the Umayyad prince Khalid ibn Yazid (). It is generally considered to be the first Latin translation of an Arabic work on alchemy into Latin, completed on 11 February 1144 by the English
Arabist An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and culture (usually including Arabic literature). Origins Arabists began in medieval Muslim Spain, which lay on the ...
Robert of Chester Robert of Chester (Latin: ''Robertus Castrensis'') was an English Arabist of the 12th century. He translated several historically important books from Arabic to Latin, such as: * '' The Book of the Composition of Alchemy'' (''Liber de composition ...
. The work takes the form of a dialogue between Khalid ibn Yazid and his purported alchemical master, the Byzantine monk Morienus (Arabic , , perhaps from Greek , ), himself supposedly a pupil of the philosopher
Stephanus of Alexandria Stephanus of Alexandria (; fl. c. 580 – c. 640) was a Byzantine philosopher and teacher who, besides philosophy in the Neo-Platonic tradition, also wrote on alchemy, astrology and astronomy. He was one of the last exponents of the Alexandrian aca ...
( seventh century). Widely popular among later alchemists, the work is extant in many
manuscripts A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document written by hand – or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten – as opposed to mechanically printed or reproduced in ...
and has been printed and translated into vernacular languages several times since the sixteenth century.


Arabic text

The Latin translation is for the most part based on an Arabic source, though both the Arabic and the Latin contain sections not present in the other. The Arabic text belongs to the alchemical works associated with Khalid ibn Yazid, which are widely regarded as ninth- or tenth-century forgeries, although it has also been argued that some of them may go back to the eighth century. Since one manuscript of the contains a citation from the early tenth-century work ("Book of Life") attributed to
Ibn Umayl Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī ( ar, محمد بن أميل التميمي), known in Latin as Senior Zadith, was an early Muslim Alchemy, alchemist who lived from to Very little is known about his life. A Vatican Library catalogue lists on ...
(), the work may have been originally written in the latter half of the tenth century.


Latin text

The word in the Latin title does not yet refer to the art of alchemy, but rather to the mysterious material which alchemists claimed could transmute one substance into another (i.e., the elixir or
philosophers' stone The philosopher's stone or more properly philosophers' stone (Arabic: حجر الفلاسفة, , la, lapis philosophorum), is a mythic alchemical substance capable of turning base metals such as mercury into gold (, from the Greek , "gold", a ...
). The actual meaning of the Latin title is thus "the book on the composition of the elixir". As the Latin translator states in his preface:
This book styles itself the composition of alchemy. And as your Latin world does not yet know what alchemy is and what its composition is, I will clarify it in the present text. ..The philosopher Hermes and his successors defined this word as follows, for instance in the book of the mutation of substances: alchemy is a material substance taken from one and composed by one, joining between them the most precious substances by affinity and effect, and by the same natural mixture, naturally transforming them into better substances.
The author of the Latin preface appears to have had access to other translated sources, among them texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (). The emphasis on the alchemical elixir being "taken from one and composed by one" (Latin: ) may be a reference to the short and cryptic Hermetic text known as the ''
Emerald Tablet The ''Emerald Tablet'', also known as the ''Smaragdine Tablet'' or the ''Tabula Smaragdina'' (Latin, from the Arabic: , ''Lawḥ al-zumurrudh''), is a compact and cryptic Hermetic text. It was highly regarded by Islamic and European alchemists a ...
'', which mentions that "the performance of wonders stems from one, just as all things stem from one substance according to a single procedure"..


Notes


References


Bibliography


Primary sources

* (same content also availabl
online
(partial edition of the Arabic text with English translation) * (edition and French translation of the Arabic text; edition and French translation of two versions of the Latin text; study and commentary) * (edition of the Latin text) * (edition of the Latin text with English translation)


Secondary sources

* (contains a systematic comparison of the Arabic and the Latin text) * * * * (literary analysis of the and two other Arabic alchemical dialogues) * (see index p. 521, s.v. ; bibliography and summary content on pp. 461–462) * * * * * * * (survey of all Latin alchemical texts known to have been translated from the Arabic) * * * * * * {{Islamic alchemy and chemistry, state=expanded Alchemical works of the medieval Islamic world