The famous alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan may never have existed
Hundreds of Arabic treatises on alchemy, magic and philosophy carry the name Jabir ibn Hayyan, supposedly an eighth-century disciple of a Shi'ite imam. Yet no historical source mentions him before about 900, and modern scholars suspect the name was a pen name for an anonymous school of alchemists.
Around 600 works attributed to Jabir are known by title, and roughly 215 survive. Most are short pieces grouped into collections that work more like chapters, and counting those chapters separately gives a corpus of perhaps 3,000 units. Their range was enormous, from cosmology, medicine and zoology to logic and grammar, though the surviving texts mostly concern alchemy and chemistry, plus talismanic magic and the hidden properties of minerals, plants and animals.
Tentatively dated to between 850 and 950, the writings contain the earliest surviving attempt to sort chemical substances into a system, plus the first recorded recipe for making an inorganic compound, sal ammoniac, from organic material such as blood, hair or plants. They also contain an early form of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals, which dominated mineralogy until the eighteenth century, and a philosophy called the science of the balance, which sought to reduce everything to measures and proportions.
Doubts are old. The bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim, whose catalogue of 987 is the first biographical account, already reported people who denied that Jabir existed, and the philosopher al-Sijistani rejected the works as inauthentic. Much of their philosophical vocabulary was coined only in the ninth century, which fits a later origin. The texts call the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, who died in 765, 'my master'. Some historians speculate that Hayyan the Druggist, an activist for the Abbasid cause, was his father, though nothing directly supports this.
Latin translators rendered his name as Geber. In thirteenth-century Europe an unknown author, now called pseudo-Geber, began issuing alchemical and metallurgical works under that borrowed name. Paul Kraus, the scholar who first catalogued the corpus, considered The Great Book of Mercy its oldest work, and some tenth-century skeptics thought it the only one Jabir actually wrote.
Source: Jabir ibn Hayyan
