The Arabic alchemical corpus attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān
- Date of account
- Attributed to the 8th–9th centuries; many works likely compiled later
- Location
- Kufa and Abbasid Iraq in traditional biography
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
The large corpus attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān presents alchemy through laboratory procedures, numerology, cosmology, astrology, and theories of balance. It became one of the most important bodies of Arabic alchemical literature and later influenced the Latin “Geber” tradition. The lead is valuable because it tests boundaries between technical experimentation, esoteric mathematics, and religious-philosophical speculation. Modern scholarship questions whether a single historical Jābir authored the corpus and dates many works considerably later than traditional biographies suggest. Individual treatises, rather than the corpus as a whole, require separate verification.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.