![]() Therefore, the distinctions between them were fine and transmutation was possible with the correct elixir. Like the Greeks, Geber made few distinctions between life and non-life, seeing minerals as a part of creation, in some ways a ‘genus’ with similar qualities. His major work looked at the nature of metals, trying to establish exactly what gave them their different properties. He certainly performed work in attempting the holy grail of transmuting base metals into gold, and he also tried to discover the secrets to an elixir of life, perhaps even creating life from components. Like the Greek philosophers, Geber made no attempt to separate the concepts of Islamic alchemy from other disciplines, looking at them within the confines of natural science, medicine and theology, drawing upon Greek ideas of balance and perfection. However, amongst his range of other achievements, he is best known as the Father of Islamic Alchemy, writing many great works that were passed over by later European scholars and only rediscovered much later in the history of chemistry. Writing any history of chemistry including the Islamic world is difficult, simply because many of the greatest Islamic scholars were polymaths, often making great advances in philosophy, theology, medicine and a whole range of scientific disciplines.ĭuring this period, where scientific endeavor was only just beginning and there were few distinctions between the various sciences, great minds such as Ibn Hayyan, known in the west as Geber, could prosper. European portrait of "Geber", Codici Ashburnhamiani 1166, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence (Public Domain) ![]() Jabbir Ibn-Hayyan - Geber, the Father of Islamic AlchemyĪlchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, from a 15th c. Al Rhazes took this further, and added empirical methods, in the first steps towards developing chemistry as a separate discipline. Jabbir Ibn Hayyan was the first Islamic scholar to delve deeply into Islamic alchemy and to present theories. This was despite the attempts of the Renaissance scholars to ignore it in favor of Greek alchemy and elegant beliefs, perhaps hindered by the inability of the Europeans to understand Arabic. In the new and exciting field of Islamic alchemy, two great names stand out as the pioneers of the discipline, scholars whose work formed the basis of chemistry and filtered into Europe by osmosis. ![]() However, many European scholars believed that the Islamic Alchemists merely translated the original Greek ideas without adding anything new, which discredited the novel discoveries made by the Islamic scholars. In addition to using the underlying framework of Greek alchemy, they added knowledge from China and India, developing novel ideas and making discoveries that would become common knowledge to chemists once the esoterica and the dogma were discredited. ![]() The Islamic scholars, whilst still holding to the principles of Aristotle and attempting to transmute base metals into gold and find the elixir of life, were the first scientists to attempt to quantify the process and use the scientific method proposed by such scholars as Ibn Sina and Al Haytham. The History of Chemistry - the Greek Influence
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