Chemistry · a Light

Three thousand books carry his name and he wrote few

Jabir ibn Hayyan is said to have lived in Kufa in the eighth century and to have studied with Ja'far al-Sadiq. Some three thousand treatises circulated under his name. In 1942 the scholar Paul Kraus showed from internal evidence that they cannot be the work of one man of that period: they quote translations made later, and most of the corpus belongs to the late ninth and tenth centuries, the product of a school rather than a person. What the corpus contains is a landmark all the same. Substances are classified, apparatus is described, and procedures are set out in order, calcination, sublimation, crystallisation, distillation. One passage, in Holmyard's translation, says that whoever does not perform practical work and make experiments will never attain the least degree of mastery. The Latin books signed Geber are different works again, written in Europe.

The Jabirian corpus · 8th to 10th centuries