Chinese Alchemy

Abstract

IT is generally agreed that chemistry had its origin about the first century A.D. at Alexandria, where the Egyptian metallurgical and technical arts combined with speculative philosophy and theosophy to form a belief in the possibility of the transmutation of metals into gold. On the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in A.D. 640 this knowledge passed to Arabia, largely through the intermediary of Syriac translations of the Greek treatises. Arabic chemistry is not earlier than the seventh-eighth century A.D. and appears to be greatly dependent upon that borrowed from Alexandria.