This legend of the “feministic” origin of chemistry is in reality much older than the fifth century of our era, and is but a variant of that which, according to Jewish writers, led to the expulsion of man from Paradise. A similar myth was current among the Phœnicians, Persians, Greeks, and Magi. We trace it in the legend of Sibylla, who demanded, as the price of her favour to Phœbus, not only length of years, but a knowledge of the divine arcanum. Some of the ecclesiastics who elaborated these myths are particular in their accounts of the mysteries thus imparted. They included the use of charms, a knowledge of gold and silver and precious stones, the art of dyeing, of painting the eyebrows, etc.—the kind of arcana, in fact, which women in all ages were presumably most keen to know. It is, however, significant that in all allusions to chemia, even after the translation of the seat of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, it is implied that a knowledge of it was a sacred mystery to be known only to the priesthood, and jealously guarded by them. It was characteristic of writers who had affixed an eternal stigma on Eve to make the sex in general answerable for an illicit knowledge of “things unfit for men to know.”
For, in reality, chemistry originated with men, and it was not so much in the love of women as of wine that it took its rise.
The manufacture of alcohol by processes of fermentation is probably the oldest of the chemical arts. The word wine means, in fact, a product of fermentation. Mosaic history relates that Noah, soon after he got to dry land, “planted a vineyard and drank of the wine,” with results that would appear to show that the potency of wine was not unfamiliar to him. Diodorus Siculus, who studied Egyptian antiquities when Egypt was a Roman province, states that the ancient Egyptians ascribed the origin of wine to Osiris. It was a sacrificial offering even in the earliest times, as was bread. Wine seems to have been prepared by the Chinese as far back as the time of the Emperor Yü, circa 2220 B.C. Beer was manufactured in Egypt in the time of Senwosret III. (Sesostris) B.C. 1880.
The Egyptians were skilled in dyeing and in the manufacture of leather, and in the production and working of metals and alloys. They were familiar with the methods of tempering iron. They made glass, artificial gems, and enamels. The oldest known enamel was found as an amulet on the Egyptian Queen Aahotep (1700 B.C.), and glass beads were made before the time of Thutmosis III. (1475 B.C.). The Jews knew of gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin. Indeed, it is through them and the Phœnicians, who were among the earliest of traders, that Europe was gradually made acquainted with many technical products of Eastern origin.
The beginnings of the art of extracting and working of metals are lost in the mists of antiquity; the chemistry of metals, indeed, has been said to be almost coeval with mankind. Diodorus Siculus found traditions in Egypt as to the first inventor of metallurgical processes identical with that of the son of Lamech and Zillah, Tubal-cain, or Tuval-cain, of the Hebrews—the Vulcan of the Romans.
Gold was undoubtedly one of the earliest metals to be made use of by men, as it probably was one of the first to be discovered. It occurs free in nature, and is met with in many rocks and in the sands of rivers. Its colour, lustre, and density would early attract attention to it; and its malleability and ductility and the ease with which it could be fashioned, together with its unalterability, would render it valuable. Ethiopian and Nubian gold were known from the earliest times, and quartz crushing and gold washing were practised by the Egyptians. Representations of these processes have been found on Egyptian tombs dating from 2500 B.C. Gold-wire was used by the Egyptians for embroidery, and they practised plating, gilding, and inlaying as far back as 2000 B.C.
Silver also was employed by them, and appears, like gold, to have been coined into money. It was originally known as “white gold.” Some of the oldest coins in existence are alloys of silver and gold, obtained probably by the fusion of naturally occurring argentiferous gold, such as the pale gold of the Pactolus. Such an alloy was termed electrum, from its resemblance in colour to amber.
Copper is also found to a limited extent in the metallic state, but probably the greater part of that used by the ancients was obtained from its ores, which are comparatively abundant and readily smelted. It was also used for coinage by the Egyptians, and was fashioned by them into a variety of utensils and implements. The older writers drew no clear distinction between copper, bronze, and brass, and the terms designating them—æs and χαλκός—are frequently employed; as by Pliny, indiscriminately. The statement in Deut. viii. 9—“Out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass”—obviously cannot mean an alloy of copper and zinc, since this does not occur naturally.
Pure copper is too soft a metal to be used for swords and cutting instruments, but copper ores frequently contain associated metals, as, for example, tin, which would confer upon the copper the necessary hardness to enable it to be fashioned into weapons. Such copper would be of the character of bronze, and it was known to the early workers that the nature of the metal was greatly modified by the selection of ores from particular localities. It was comparatively late in the metallurgical history of copper that bronze was produced by knowingly adding tin to the metal.
Copper was largely used by the Romans, who obtained it from Cyprus; it was known to them as æs Cyprium, and eventually Cuprum, whence we obtain the chemical symbol Cu. What the Romans called æs was found also at Chalkis, in Eubœa, whence χαλκός, the Greek word for copper.