The book of alums and salts
The Book of Alums and Salts is a basic alchemy work. It was written in Spain around the 11th century. The sources used were writings from Islamic scholars such as Jabir ibn Hayyān and Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi, as well as writings from Egyptian circles. The book can be divided into four sections:
- Minerals ( arsenic , sulfur, mercury)
- Metals (gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead)
- From glass and stones (glass, talq, marcasite )
- From the alums and salts ( vitriol , alum , salts, alkali, tinkar, salmiak)
The title of the entire work is therefore misleading because it is the same as that of the last section. That is why there are very different names in different catalogs.
The book was written in Arabic but was translated into Latin shortly afterwards. Today various translations and an Arabic text have been scattered and reprinted in various libraries:
- Latin manuscript 6514 in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; Reprinted and improved in
- Latin print De Mineralibus Liber by Ioannes Garlandius as an appendix to his work Compendium Alchimiae Basel 1560
- Arabic original, 11 sheets, in the Berlin manuscript Sprenger 1908
- Two anonymous texts in Oxford from the 14th century listed in the Catalog of Latin and vernacular alchemical manuscripts
- Anonymous text in the collective manuscript Arundel 164 in the British Library in London from the 15th century. The manuscript was owned by Willibald Pirckheimer .
- Manuscript in Codex Speciale under the title Sermo de Aluminibus et Salibus, quae in hac arte necessaria sunt
- Manuscripts in the British Museum in London
literature
- Joachim Telle : Book of alums and salts . In: Lexicon of the Middle Ages . Volume 2, Col. 811-812.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Julius Ruska : The book of alums and salts . juliusruska.digilibrary.de. Accessed April 2, 2009 (Verlag Chemie, Berlin, 1935)
- ^ Robert Steele: Rasis de aluminibus et salibus, translated by Gerard of Cremona Isis, Vol XII No. 37, 1929, p. 12ff.
- ↑ Catalog of Latin and vernacular alchemical manuscripts, PMC 233612 (free full text)
- ^ Catalog of Illuminated Manuscripts