THE LEYDEN PAPYRUS X
An English Translation with Brief Notes
Earle Radcliffe Caley, Monroeville, Ohio I. Introduction
The
chemical arts and knowledge of the ancient world are known to us
chiefly through the writings of Pliny, Dioscorides, Theophrastus,
Vitruvius, and a few other writers, aided in a considerable degree by
the examination and chemical analysis of the various relics and remains
of the older civilizations. While these writings do furnish us with a
very considerable degree of information concerning the beginnings of
chemical knowledge they are, at the best, only indirect sources and are
lacking in details. By a fortunate chance, however, there have come to
light in recent years-two original sources in the form of two
remarkable Greek papyri known to students of the early history of
chemistry as the Leyden Papyrus X and the Stockholm Papyrus. These
invaluable documents are by far the most ancient that we possess
dealing with chemical arts and operations as such. The earliest
authentic alchemical manuscript is that of St. Marks at Venice which is
believed to have been transcribed from earlier writings during the
tenth or eleventh centuries. These two papyri have, however, upon the
basis of unquestioned philological and paleographic evidence, been
ascertained to have been written at about the end of the third century
A.D. so that they are by far the earliest original historical evidence
that we have in our possession concerning the nature and the extent of
ancient chemical knowledge. They are; therefore, of the
highest value for the history of chemistry and throw a whole flood of
light upon the origins of the pseudo-science, alchemy, as the
researches of Berthelot have so clearly demonstrated.1
These
two documents formed part of a valuable collection of Greek papyri
gathered at Thebes by Johann d'Anastasy, vice-consul for Sweden at
Alexandria, Egypt, during the first decades of the nineteenth century.
The major portion of this collection was sold in 1828 to the
Netherlands Government and deposited in the Museum of Antiquities at
Leyden. The examination of the various papyri in this collection
occupied a period of nearly forty years, the first results being
published by the Netherlands Government in 1843. None of the papyri
first translated offered any results of chemical interest. It was
known, though, through preliminary researches that some of the
remaining documents were in the nature of technical treatises. It was
not until 1885 that the remaining papyri together with their Latin
translations were made public by the Netherlands Government in the
form of a volume entitled: Papyri Graeci musei
1 M. Berthelot, "Les Origines de L'Alchemie," Paris, 1885.
