On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art

by James Mactear

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 (a word apparently Sanscrit), 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.”

They added, “that he received from the Creator and promulgated amongst men a sacred book in a heavenly language, to which the Musselman author gives the Arabic title of Desatir, or Regulations, but the original name of which he has not mentioned; and that fourteen Mahabads had appeared, or would appear, in human shapes for the government of this world.”

“Now when we know that the Hindoos believe in fourteen Menus, or celestial persons with similar functions, the first of whom left a book of regulations, or divine ordinances, which they hold equal to the Veda, and the language of which they believe to be that of the gods, we can hardly doubt that the first corruption of the purest and oldest religion was the system of Indian theology invented by the Brahmins and prevalent in those territories where the book of Mahabad, or Menu, is at this moment the standard of all religious and moral duties.”

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.

Greek physicians were in great request at the Persian court, and when the daughter of the Emperor Aurelian was sent in marriage to the Persian monarch, Sapor II., she had a number of Greek physicians in her train. This king founded a new city called Jondisabour in honour of his Queen, and owing to the settlement here of a number of Greek physicians, who had, on account of religious differences, retired into Persia, this city became celebrated as a medical school. Dr. Friend gives the names of these as “Damascius the Syrian, Simplicius of Cilicia, Diogenes of Phænicea, Isidorus of Gaza, and others, the most learned and greatest philosophers of the age.” It is thought by some authors that many of the Arabian writers who belonged to the college of Baghdad were educated at Jondisabour.

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.