Read Ebook: On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art by Mactear James

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There is ample evidence, therefore, that the Greeks had communication with, and borrowed the philosophy of, both Persia and India at a very early date.

That there was intimate intercourse with India in very ancient times there can be no doubt. In addition to the classical sources of information collected chiefly by the officers of Alexander the Great, Seleucus and the Ptolemies, and which was condensed and reduced to consistent shape by Diodorus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian, within the first century before and the first century after Christ, we have the further proof of the fact by the constant finds of innumerable Greek coins over a large portion of north-western India, and even at Cabul. These, so far as yet known, commence with the third of the Seleucidae, and run on for many centuries, the inscriptions showing that the Greek characters were used in the provinces of Cabul and the Punjab even so late as the fourth century A.D. The consideration of these coins of the Graeco-Persian empire of the Seleucidae naturally leads us to the consideration of the Persians.

I have already shown that the Greeks and Persians held intimate relations with each other as early as the fourth century B.C., and from the speech of Demosthenes against a proposed war with Persia, delivered in 354 B.C, we may well believe that they had already had a long and intimate connection with each other. The passage rends thus:-

"All Greeks know that, so long as they regarded Persia as their common enemy, they were at peace with each other, and enjoyed much prosperity, but since they have looked upon the King as a friend, and quarrelled about disputes with each other, they have suffered worse calamities than any one could possibly imprecate upon them."

Previous to the Persian empire there existed three principal powers in Asia--the Medes, the Chaldaeans or Babylonish, and the Lydian. Of these the Medes and Chaldaeans were the most ancient, and their joint power would seem to have extended eastward as far as the Oxus and Indus.

Of these nations the Babylonians were the most highly civilized, and, did time permit, we might find much that would interest and instruct in examining the various facts relating to the arts and sciences amongst these nations. We know that arts and sciences must have been diligently cultivated amongst them, and that magic and astrology were held in high repute.

That the Persians were well acquainted with other nations is shown clearly from the remains of their great city of Persepolis, where the sculptured figures represent many types of mankind--the negro, with thick lips and flat nose, and with his crisp, wooly hair, clearly cut; and the half-naked Indian, with his distinguishing features, being easily singled out from many others.

Persia held sway over a huge district of India--the limits of this are not known; but, in addition, they were well acquainted with a large portion of the north-western part of India.

The traditions and historical records of the Persians are contained in the famous series of writings culled the Zend-avesta. These writings are, it is thought, of an age even before the Persian dynasty was established; and it has been shown by the researches of M. Anguetil and Sir W. Jones that there is indeed a great probability of the Zend having been a dialect of the ancient Sanscrit language. In the vocabulary attached to M. Anguetil's great work on the Zend-avesta no less than 60 to 70 per cent. of the words are said to be pure Sanscrit.

As the oldest known language of Persia was Chaldaeic, we are again thrown back on Indian sources for the origin of the great book of the ancient Persians. Even the name of the priests of the Persian religion of Zoroaster, Mag or Magi, is of Sanscrit derivation.

The Persians kept up an enormous army, which was spread through all the various provinces and Satrapies, and consisted in great part of paid auxiliaries. In at least the later period of Persian power the Greeks were preferred to all others, and in the time of Cyrus the Younger they composed the flower of the Persian army, and were employed in garrisoning most of the chief cities of Asia Minor.

The description given by Herodotus of the vast army and fleet prepared for the expedition of Xerxes against the Greeks gives us an idea of the extent of the Persian power, and of the wide range of countries and nations over which they held sway. The review held on the Plain of Doriscus was perhaps the greatest military spectacle ever beheld either before or since. Herodotus enumerates no less than 56 different nations, all of them in their national dress and arms. Besides the Persians there were "Medes and Bactrians; Libyans in war chariots with four horses; Arabs on camels; Sagartians, wild huntsmen who employed, instead of the usual weapons of the time, the lasso; the nomadic tribes of Bucharia and Mongolia; Ethiopians in lions' skins, and Indians in cotton robes; Phoenician sailors, and Greeks from Asia Minor." All these and many others were there assembled by the despotic power of the Persian king.

The system of government employed by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with or were subdued by them.

The Persians were famed for their knowledge of astronomy and astrology, and were said "to have anciently known the most wonderful powers of nature, and to have therefore acquired great fame as magicians and enchanters."

The close relation between the Persian religious traditions and those of the Hindoos is very striking. According to Mohsan, "The best informed Persians, who professed the faith of Hu-shang as distinguished from that of Zeratusht, believes that the first monarch of Iran, and, indeed, of the whole world, was Mahabad , who divided the people into four orders,--the religious, the military, the commercial, and the servile, to which he assigned names unquestionably the same as those now applied to the four primary classes of the Hindoos."

Having established, then, the long and intimate nature of the Persian intercourse with India, let us see how it bears on our more immediate subject.

The works on medicine which are known to exist, and to have been written in Persian, are not very many in number, but they cover a period of time of nearly 400 years. The oldest of them is of the year 1392 A.D., and in it and its successors there are long lists of Arabian authors whose works had been consulted, and also various Indian works.

The district of Jondisabour is even yet one of the most nourishing in Persia, and contains mines which still yield turquoise, salt, lead, copper, antimony, iron, and marble.

During the reign of the Persian king Nooshirwan, his physician Barzoueh made various journeys into India, one of which was specially for the purpose of obtaining copies of Indian literature, and another to obtain medicaments and herbs.

How to account for the strange fact that all schools of medicine which have risen, flourished, and disappeared, have left some trace in historical records, with the exception of that of India, is most difficult, unless under the hypothesis that the language in which the science and philosophy of India was recorded has been almost a sealed book to the world, and is even now quite unintelligible to the people of India itself, generally speaking, and that thus the only way in which the results of the long ages of philosophic study, which unquestionably have had a place in India, have only been known by this dark reflection from the writings of Greek and Arabic writers, which were scattered broadcast over the ancient world. The Greeks, we know, borrowed their science largely from the Egyptians, both in respect to theology and philosophy; and we might, with much profit, pursue the examination of our subject amongst the records of that highly civilized amongst the ancient nations.

Many authors have attempted to show that there is a wonderful resemblance between the Egyptians and the Hindoos, the sculptures on the monuments of the former are most wonderfully like those of India, and the features, dress, and arms are all as like as may be.

Both nations had the various arts of weaving, dyeing, embroidering, working in metals, and the manufacture of glass, and practised them with but little difference in their methods. The fine muslins of India find their counterparts as "woven wind" in the transparent tissues figured on the Egyptian temples. The style of building, the sciences of astronomy, music, and medicine were assiduously cultivated by both nations, and there was direct intercourse between them, perhaps even before historical time begins.

Rameses the Great , called also Sesostris, fitted out not only war ships but merchant vessels for the purpose of trading with India, in B.C. 1235, and Wilkinson in his book on the Ancient Egyptians, tells us that in 2000 B.C. there were no less than 400 ships trading to the Persian Gulf. There is, after all, nothing surprising in this when we remember the fact, which is, however, not generally known, I am afraid, that under the reign of Pharoah Necho, a fleet of his ships safely circumnavigated Africa, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, this being in advance of the celebrated voyage of Diaz and Vasco da Gama by no less than 2100 years.

No less than seven centuries before Thales went to study in Egypt, astronomical calculations were inscribed on the monuments at Thebes, so that we can see how modern by comparison the Greek philosophy appears.

In a note Wilkinson says that "The science of Medicine was one of the earliest cultivated in Egypt. Athothes, the successor of Menes of the first dynasty, is said to have written on the subject, and five papyri on the subject have survived.

"They are of the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties.

"One known as the Papyrus Ebers, from its discoverer, is attributed to the age of Kherpheres or Bikheres.

"The second, that of Berlin, found in the reign of Usaphais of the first dynasty, was completed by Senet or Sethenes of the second line.

"The third, that of the British Museum, contains a receipt said to have been mysteriously discovered in the reign of Cheops of the fourth dynasty.

"The curatives employed were ointments, drinks, plasters, fumigations and clysters, and the drugs employed were taken from vegetables, minerals, and animals.

"Those for each draught were mixed together, pounded, boiled, and strained through linen.

"The doctors belonged to the sacred class, and were only permitted to practice their own particular branch.

"These were oculists, dentists, those who confined their practice to diseases of the head, and those again who only attended to internal diseases; they were paid from the public treasury, and were compelled, before being permitted to practice, to study the precepts laid down by their predecessors."

Homer, in the Odyssey, describes Egypt "as a country whose fertile soil produces an infinity of drugs, some salutary and some pernicious, where each physician possesses knowledge above all other men."

The mixing of various drugs and minerals must have produced effects which could not be lost on such observant men as the doctors must, from their training, have been, and it would be absurd to suppose that some, at least, of the simpler chemical decompositions and combinations were not known to them.

The manufacture of glass would seem to have been very ancient amongst the Egyptians, and the insufficiency of the old fable, of its discovery by the fusing of blocks of stone in the fire is quite clear; besides, Egyptian glass has been found which contains potash, and nothing is more probable than that the nitrate of potash, found so plentifully in the soil of India, was imported for this manufacture.

Precious stones or amulets with Sanscrit inscriptions have repeatedly been found in tombs, which must date back to at least B.C. 1400.

In tracing back the history of Chemistry, we constantly find reference to Hermes, Trismegistus, who would seem to be the god Thoth, or Taaut of the Egyptians. The famous inscription of the Emerald table ascribes to him the possession of three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. I have been much struck with the resemblance of this god Taaut with the Menu of the Hindoos, who also was credited with saving from destruction by the flood the three Vedas, which were supposed to contain all that was required for man's direction here below.

There would appear to have been also other Hermes, but if we look at the condition of things which obtained in Egypt when the Pyramids of Memphis are supposed to have been erected, within 300 years of the supposed date of the deluge, and that the Beni Hassan tombs, about 300 years later, depict the manners and customs of what we cannot help admitting, was a highly civilized nation, we must be struck with the fact that the distance of time between the deluge and the building of these pyramids and tombs is so short, that it might be represented by a comparison of our own date with those of Queen Elizabeth and Henry the Third.

Jackson in his "Antiquities" tells us that, Sanchoniatho states that the most ancient Phoenician records show that letters were invented soon after the dispersion of mankind, by Tsaut, the son of Mizor or Misraim, who was the first Egyptian Hermes or Thoth. He went out of Phoenicia, and first, with a colony of Mizrites, settled and reigned in Egypt, and, according to Cicero, gave both laws and letters to the Egyptians.

This Hermes was born in the second generation after the flood, and was not only the inventor of letters and writing, but he is also said to have delineated the sacred characters or symbols of the elements and planets, viz.,--sun, moon, earth, air, fire, water, &c.

These symbols are without doubt of very ancient origin, and Boerhaeve in his Theory of Chemistry explains them hieroglyphically as follows:--

+ Denotes anything sharp, gnawing, or corrosive; as vinegar or fire: being supposed to be stuck around with barbed spikes.

? Denotes a perfect immutable simple body, such as gold, which has nothing acrimonious or heterogeneous adhering to it.

? Denotes half gold, whose inside, if turned outward, would make it entire gold, as having nothing foreign or corrosive in it; which the alchemists observe of silver.

? Denotes the inside to be pure gold, but the outer part of the colour of silver and a corrosive underneath, which, if taken away, would leave it mere gold, and this the adepts affirm of mercury.

? Denotes the chief part to be gold; whereto, however, adheres another large, crude, corrosive part, which, if removed, would leave the rest possessed with all the properties of gold, and this the adepts affirm of copper.

? Likewise denotes gold at the bottom, but attended with a great proportion of a sharp corrosive, sometimes amounting to a half of the whole, whence half the character expresses acrimony; which, accordingly, both alchemists and physicians observe of iron, and hence that common opinion of the adepts that the aurum vivum, or gold of the philosophers, is contained in iron, and that the universal medicine is rather to be sought in this metal than in gold itself.

? Denotes half the matter of tin to be silver, the other a crude corrosive acid, which is accordingly confirmed by the assayers; tin proving almost as fixed as silver in the cupel, and discovering a large quantity of crude sulphur well known to the alchemists.

? Denotes almost the whole to be corrosive, but retaining some resemblance with silver, which the artists very well know holds true of lead.

? Denotes a chaos--world, or one thing which includes all: this is the character of antimony, wherein is found gold, with plenty of an arsenical corrosive.

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