The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

I
General Introduction
1.1 The Oldest Chemical Documents
Sometime around 1828 a considerable number of papyri were
recovered (presumably by grave robbers) from burial sites near
Thebes in central Egypt, many of which were subsequently
acquired by Johann d’Anastasy, the Swedish-Norwegian Vice
Council at Alexandria. These were not in the form of rolls written
in ancient hieroglyphics but rather in the form of separate
numbered sheets or codices written in Greek, indicating that the
documents and burials were from the Greco-Roman period and
probably dated from sometime around the late 3rd or early 4th
century AD. The papyri in question were in remarkably good condition,
due in part to their having been placed either in tightly
sealed coffins or in sealed stone containers, and, in part, because
they were, at the time of the original burials, brand new, having
been especially copied for that purpose as so-called “Totenbeigaben”
or death offerings intended to accompany and serve the
deceased in the afterlife. The following year d’Anastasy sold 24
of these papyri to the Museum of Antiquities at the University of
Leyden, and in 1832 he made a gift of the remaining items to the
Swedish Royal Academy of Antiquities (1).
! In 1830 Caspar Reuvens, the Director of the Leyden University
Museum, published a descriptive account of the museum’s Greco-
Egyptian holdings in which he noted that one of the papyri in the
newly acquired d’Anastasy collection, which had been given the
number 9 in d’Anastasy’s original catalog and the number 66 in
Reuvens’ own listing, dealt almost exclusively with chemical recipes
(2). Reuvens characterized it as being “alchemical” in nature
and also included some brief extracts. It was, however, not until
1869 that the existence of the Leyden papyrus was finally
brought to the attention of chemical historians, when the German
chemist and historian, Hermann Kopp, included a description of
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