The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

THE LEYDEN & STOCKHOLM PAPYRI
the document, based on Reuvens’ earlier summary of its contents,
in the first volume of his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Chemie,
though he rather surprisingly made no reference to it in his later
1886 monograph Alchemie in älterer und neuerer Zeit (3).
! In 1885 the French chemist and chemical historian, Pierre
Marcellin Berthelot, made use of the Leyden papyrus in his speculative
account of the origins of Greco-Egyptian alchemy (4). Like
Kopp, his knowledge of this work was based largely on Reuvens’
earlier summary, though that same year Conradus Leemans,
Reuvens’ successor as the Director of the Leyden Museum,
finally published the complete text of the original papyrus in Latin
translation (5). Since this appeared as part of a two-volume collection
of translations of other papyri, Leemans gave each of them
a distinguishing letter, whence the name “Leyden papyrus X.”
Two years later Berthelot published a French translation of
Leemans’ text along with a detailed chemical commentary (6),
and in 1906 he also published a reproduction of the original Greek
text as well (7).
! Meanwhile, the papyri given to the Swedish Royal Academy of
Antiquities languished in its archives until their transfer to the
Victoria Museum at Uppsala in 1906, when they came to the attention
of Otto Lagercrantz, who discovered that they also contained a
collection of chemical recipes similar to that of the Leyden papyrus,
and who finally published the original text with a German translation
in 1913 (8). That same year the Austrian chemist and chemical
historian, Edmund von Lippmann, published a detailed article
describing and comparing both papyri, which eventually served as
the basis of his account of these documents in his epic 1919 work
Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie (1, 9).
! It was not until 1924, however, and the appearance of John
Maxson Stillman’s Story of Early Chemistry that an Englishlanguage
account of these papyri was finally published (10).
Indeed, Stillman’s book was, and still remains, the single best
English-language summary of the work of such classic chemical
historians as Kopp, Berthelot and von Lippmann, none of whose
original books were ever translated. Though Stillman also gave a
partial translation of several of the recipes from both papyri, it was
not until 1926 and 1927 that Earle Caley finally provided a set of
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