Islamic Alchemy: A Primer

Islamic alchemy grew out of Greek alchemy, and built upon it. It is still debated how much it borrowed from Greek late antique sources and how much it attributed its own works to Greek authorities. 

An important feature of alchemy in the Mediterranean world was its tendency toward pseudoepigraphy (the attribution of authorship to ancient or famous writers). Alchemists would write treatises 'in the style of' or 'in the tradition of' a more established alchemist or philosopher and not claim personal authorship. Thus, treatises could be attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of alchemy, to Democritus (a famous Greek philosopher), to Aristotle, or to Zosimos of Panopolis (an Egyptian alchemist). 

In some cases, scholars are still debating the authorship of some texts. While everyone agrees that Hermes Trismegistus never existed, and Aristotle never wrote an alchemical treatise, things become unclear in late antiquity and early medieval period. This is both a problem of the paucity of the historical record and of the lack of sufficient scholarship in the field. 

Islamic alchemy is a particularly under-researched field, although this is thankfully rapidly changing at the moment. There was a flourishing of studies, particularly originating amongst German scholars, in the 1920s-1960s, when they declined. New studies have finally been emerging in the last decade or thereabouts, but much still remains to be done, and new scholars still rely on pioneering interwar studies as fundamental to their field. 

The following stages of Islamic alchemy can be proposed:
1. Translation and Pseudoepigraphy
2. Jabir ibn Hayyan and the Jabirian corpus (8th century?)
3. Abu Bakr ben Zakariya al-Razi (called Rhazes in the Latin corpus) (c. 865-c.925) 
4. Late alchemy (Ibn Umail, al Magriti etc)