The title of the tract, Liber Ignium, a Marco Græco descriptus, assuming it to have been correctly and literally translated, was not written by a Byzantine Greek. No Byzantine Greek ever described himself (or a compatriot) as a Greek: “in the lowest period of degeneracy and decay the name of Roman adhered to the last fragments of the Empire of Constantinople.”[143] The writer of the title, therefore, was either a Moslem or a western.
The author of recipe 26, Ignem Græcum, &c., was neither a Greek nor a Moslem. No Greek[144] or Moslem[145] writer ever uses the phrase “Greek fire,” which sprang up in the West during the Crusades.[146] The recipe, therefore, cannot have been written before the siege of Nice, 1097, the first act of the first crusade, and it was probably not written until long afterwards. The phrase “Greek fire” must have taken some time to reach the West, and it spread there very slowly. Abbé Guibert de Nogent, who died in 1124, speaks of “discharging from machines the fire they call Greek” (Græcos, quos ita vocitant, Ignes injicere machinis).[147] At the close of the century William the Little, Canon of St. Mary’s, Newburgh, Yorkshire, mentions “a certain kind of fire which they call Greek “ (quodam ignis genere quem Græcum dicunt)[148] Such modes of expression show that Greek fire was very little known in the West during the twelfth century. In the Liber Ignium, on the other hand, it is spoken of without qualification or explanation, like sulphur or pitch, as a substance too well known to require note or comment. The 26th recipe, therefore, belongs very probably to the first quarter of the thirteenth century, and its author was certainly a western.
The hypothesis of a Greek original, then, must be abandoned, even though old Greek alchemical traditions are crystallised in the Early Recipes. The Greeks founded alchemy in remote times; their methods were transmitted through the Syrians and Egyptian Greeks to the Moslems; and a large number of their recipes had become common property long before the Liber Ignium was written. But Greek science did not spread equally in all directions, at least to any appreciable extent. It spread to the south and east only, and the west owed its knowledge of alchemy to the Arabs who invaded Spain in 710 A.D. This fact may throw some light upon the Arabic words and allusions to be found in the tract.
In a very old recipe, No. 9, we meet with the phrase, “the first fall of the autumnal rain “ (primo autumnalis pluviae dilapsu), which indicates the regular, periodic rains of the East, and is apparently the translation of خريف (kharif) = the autumnal rains. The beginning of these rains was an event of great importance to the Arabs. “Suivant Masudi,” says Baron de Sacy, “les Arabes nomment l’automne وسمي (wasmy), à cause des pluies qui tombent en cette saison, parceque la terre, étant alors très-sèche, et n’ayant pas été humectée depuis longtemps, la première pluie qui vient à tomber imprime sa marque sur la terre.... Il ajoute que les Arabes commencent l’année à l’équinoxe d’automne, parceque c’est l’époque où commence à tomber la pluie à laquelle ils doivent leur subsistance.”[149]
Alambicum is apparently the latinised form of the Spanish alambique, which is simply the Arabic الانبيق (al-ambiq)—whatever the derivation of the Arabic word may be.
استرلاب (Asturlab), although found in Masudi[150] and the “Arabian Nights,”[151] is not a genuine Arab word. It was borrowed from some other language by the Arabs, who possessed few or no scientific words of their own. The “Nihayet al-Adab” tells us (in Lane’s “Arabic Dictionary,” under asturlab) that the names of all instruments by which time is known, whether by means of calculation or water or sand, are foreign to the Arabic language. In most Arabic dictionaries asturlab is derived from the Greek ἀστρολάβος, a word which appears to go back no further than the second century B.C., when it was employed by the Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy. But it was long suspected that the instrument was of eastern origin,[152] and all doubt about the matter was at length set at rest by Mr. George Smith’s discovery, in the palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh, of the fragment of an astrolabe,[153] which cannot be dated later than the eighth century B.C. Now the earliest recorded astronomical observation made by the Greeks was the determination of the summer solstice by Meton, 430 B.C.[154] For the name of this fragment, therefore, we must look to the language of the country of its birth; and there we find the Persian asturlab, which is apparently formed from the primitive verbal root labh = taking,[155] and the Persian astar or sitára = Pehlevi, çtârak = Zend, çtare = Sanskrit, star = our own star. The Arabs most probably took their asturlab, with so many other words, from the Persian. The Greeks who followed Alexander the Great into Persia found there much that was new to them. They saw for the first time “the cotton tree and the fine tissues and paper for which it furnished the materials.”[156] They handled the wool of the great Bombax tree. They found naphtha, of whose properties Alexander was entirely ignorant.[157] They obtained drugs and gums of which they knew nothing. The philosopher Kallisthenes discovered in Babylon Chaldæan astronomical observations extending back to 721 B.C.;[158] was shown, we cannot doubt, the instrument with which they were made; and probably heard for the first time the word asturlab or usturlab.
For copper (or some alloy of it[159]) the cyprium of Pliny (which became cuprum about the end of the third century A.D.) is ignored in the tract, and the metal is called æs rubicundus. This phrase may possibly represent the χαλκὸς ἐρυθρός of Homer (Il. ix. 365); but it is far more probably the literal translation of the Arabic phrase used to this day for copper نحاس احمر (nuhas ahmar) = red brass.
Four (so-called) sulphurs are mentioned by both Pliny and the writers of the Liber Ignium, but their names are identical in only one case, sulphur vivum. Two sulphurs are named in the tract from their colour, after the oriental fashion, sulphur splendidum and sulphur croceum. Masudi speaks in the tenth century of “white, yellow, and other kinds of sulphur,”[160] and “white and red sulphur” are mentioned in the Ayin Acberi, a Persian MS. quoted by the Baron de Sacy.[161] Several sulphurs, all named from their colour, are given in the Liber Secretorum, translated from the Arabic or Persian, cir. 1000 A.D.,[162] and similar sulphurs are found in the Syriac treatise reproduced by M. Berthelot, ii. 159-60. Finally, the Hindus had four sulphurs, white, red, yellow, and black.[163]
The Arabs had no special word for bitumen: bitumen is not to be found in the tract.
Alkitran, the Spanish alquitran, which is used five times, is pure Arabic, القطران (al-qitran).