The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
of their work, nor confused in these operations to any considerable
extent by metaphysical or mystical ideas.
! If, instead of wasting our time fruitlessly speculating about the
unknown authors and/or original owners of these papyri, we concentrate
instead on their format and contents, then it is far more
logical to consider them as a part of a tradition of practical recipe
books intended for metal workers, jewelers, dyers, and artisans,
rather than as proto-alchemical documents – a practical tradition
which extents back in time to the Assyrian cuneiform tablets dealing
with glass recipes, mentioned in the previous section, and
forward in time through an almost continuous tradition of medieval
recipe books intended for artists and craftsmen, of which the most
famous are the Compositiones variae (c. 790 AD) (19), the Mappae
clavicule (c. 810 AD) (20), the De diversis artibus of Theophilus
(c. 1100) (21), and the De coloribus et artibus Romanorum of
Eraclius (c. 1150). Indeed, the parallels between the Leyden and
Stockholm papyri and these later medieval recipe books were
briefly noted by von Lippmann as early as 1919 (22), were further
elaborated on by Johnson in the 1930s (19, 25), and were also consistently
maintained and developed in the writings of the late Cyril
Stanley Smith (20, 21). A feel for the richness of this later medieval
tradition may be obtained through an examination of Clarke’s
recent bibliographic study of its surviving manuscript sources (23).
! In keeping with this alternative interpretation, it is also of
interest to note that Lindsay’s 1970 study of the origins of alchemy
in Greco-Roman Egypt, unlike Berthelot’s original study of 1885,
mentions the Leyden and Stockholm papyri only in passing and
then only in the chapter on “Ancient and Contemporary Crafts”
(24). Likewise, the late Robert Multhauf, in his classic monograph
on The Origins of Chemistry, repeatedly characterized the Leyden
papyrus as an “Egyptian jeweler’s recipe book” and essentially
dismissed the earlier speculations of Berthelot concerning secret
priestly monopolies and temple rites dealing with goldsmithing and
metallurgy (25):
The older view that goldsmithing was secret work in which the
Egyptian priests themselves were involved is not probable. The
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