The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

THE LEYDEN & STOCKHOLM PAPYRI
cism, especially from the pen of the Austrian chemical historian,
Edmund von Lippmann (9, 17), though it is not always clear just
how much of this was directed at the contents of the translation
per se, how much at Berthelot’s failure to provide the kind of
critical scholarly apparatus commonly used by classicists and
archeologists, how much at errors in the transcription of the original
Greek text, and how much at Berthelot’s interpretation of their
relevance for the origins of alchemy. Similar criticisms were
also made by the modern scholar Robert Halleux, who published
revised and definitive French translations of both papyri in 1981
(33). However, these have never been translated into English, and
so we must continue to rely on Caley’s original translations of the
French and German versions provided by Berthelot and Lagercrantz
so many years ago. This is in keeping with the ultimate goal
of this small volume, which is to rescue the Caley translations from
the moldering back issues of the Journal of Chemical Education,
and to make them more readily available to students of chemistry
and the general reader, rather than to provide a definitive scholarly
English text for specialists in the classics and Egyptology.
! In preparing this new edition of Caley’s two-part English translation
of the Leyden and Stockholm papyri, we have eliminated
those few introductory paragraphs of his original articles which
dealt with the history of each papyrus, as they were lacking in
detail and have now been rendered redundant by this new general
introduction. We have, however, retained those portions which dealt
with the physical description of each papyrus, as well as those
sections containing Caley’s notes and concluding commentaries,
though all of these have now been numbered and relabeled in
keeping with the present chapter format used in this brief monograph.
! From a purely chemical standpoint, much could be done to
expand on Caley’s rather terse notes on the various materials used
in the recipes. For example, in his definitive edition, Halleux, has
constructed a Greek-French lexicon of the various materials mentioned
which is correlated with the line numbers of the original
manuscripts (a device used by classical scholars to allow for unambiguous
cross-comparison between differently paginated printed
editions of a given work) and with references to the materials in
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