The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

THE LEYDEN & STOCKHOLM PAPYRI
thought to refer to Phimenas of Sais, of whom little or nothing is
known. With little justification Berthelot claimed that this writer
was identical to a 1st century Egyptian magician by the name of
Pammenes, who is sometimes referred to by later alchemical writers,
again on the questionable grounds that anyone who writes on
the subject of gold and metallic alloys must automatically be an
alchemist as well. However, what these literary references do suggest
is that the compiler of the papyri was probably better educated
and of greater social status than a common craftsman, as does the
high quality of the burial papyri themselves.!
! Even more speculative is the attempt by some commentators
to explain away the absence of any theoretical or mystical
elements in the papyri by postulating that they are the practical
parts of a multi-volume alchemical treatise whose theoretical part
has conveniently failed to survive (31). While this persistent
practical emphasis in the papyri does not necessarily imply that
any unexpressed views on the nature of the chemical transformations
described in their recipes, which their author may or may not
of held in private, were necessarily more rational than those of
the true alchemists, one must further consider that there is implicit
evidence in the wording of several of them that their author had a
crude understanding of the distinction between a mixture or alloy,
on the one hand, and a pure metal, on the other (see, for example,
Recipes 8, 23, 26, 32, 38, 42, 43, and 44 of the Leyden papyrus). !
! Indeed, all of these attempts to force an alchemical interpretation
on the Leyden and Stockholm papyri suffer from the common
defect that they selectively focus on only those recipes dealing with
metals and alloys, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that both
papyri also contain recipes dealing with the dying of wool – a mundane
subject hardly in keeping with the focus of later alchemical literature
– and the same is equally true of the recipes for the fabrication of
gems and precious stones found in the Stockholm papyrus. Nevertheless,
it has been argued by some that these latter two topics are
not without relevance to the origins of alchemy.
! One of the implicit themes of the Stockholm papyrus is the
parallelism between the use of alum, vinegar and other materials to
corrode or prepare the surfaces of various crystals and stones prior
to dyeing them different colors and the use of various mordants
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