Jabir ibn Hayyan

Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Arabic: أبو موسى جابر بن حيّان, variously called al-Ṣūfī, al-Azdī, al-Kūfī, or al-Ṭūsī), died 806−816, is the purported author of an enormous number and variety of works in Arabic, often called the Jabirian corpus. The works that survive today mainly deal with alchemy and chemistry, magic, and Shi'ite religious philosophy. However, the original scope of the corpus was vast and diverse, covering a wide range of topics ranging from cosmology, astronomy and astrology, over medicine, pharmacology, zoology and botany, to metaphysics, logic, and grammar. Jabir's works contain the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances, and the oldest known instructions for deriving an inorganic compound (sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride) from organic substances (such as plants, blood, and hair) by chemical means. His works also contain one of the earliest known versions of the sulfur-mercury theory of metals, a mineralogical theory that would remain dominant until the 18th century. A significant part of Jabir's writings were informed by a philosophical theory known as "the science of the balance" (Arabic: ʿilm al-mīzān), which was aimed at reducing all phenomena (including material substances and their elements) to a system of measures and quantitative proportions. The Jabirian works also contain some of the earliest preserved Shi'ite eschatological, soteriological and imamological doctrines, which Jabir presented as deriving from his purported master, the Shi'ite Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. As early as the 10th century, the identity and exact corpus of works of Jabir was in dispute in Islamic scholarly circles. The authorship of all these works by a single figure, and even the existence of a historical Jabir, are also doubted by modern scholars. Instead, Jabir ibn Hayyan is thought to have been a pseudonym used by an anonymous school of Shi'ite alchemists writing in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. Some Arabic Jabirian works (e.g.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (3)

Related concepts (4)

Alchemical analysis of FDA approved drugs

Philippe Schwaller, Daniel Probst, Jean-Louis Reymond, Markus Orsi

Chemical space maps help visualize similarities within molecular sets. However, there are many different molecular similarity measures resulting in a confusing number of possible comparisons. To overcome this limitation, we exploit the fact that tools desi ...

2023

Control of Ge-Homojunction Band Offsets Via Ultrathin Ga-As Dipole Layers

Giorgio Margaritondo

Band offsets of 0.35-0.45 eV are produced at Ge homojunctions by placing a monolayer of As and an adjacent monolayer of Ga between the two Ge bulks. The "Ga-first" and "As-first" growth sequences exhibit band offsets of similar magnitude but opposite sign, ...

1992

Control of Ge Homojunction Band Offsets Via Ultrathin Ga-as Dipole Layers

Giorgio Margaritondo

We have created 0.35-0.45 eV band offsets at Ge homojunctions using Ga-As dipole intralayers, with the Ge valence band edge on the As side of the junction at lower energy. This is, to our knowledge, the first time that intralayer control of band discontinu ...

1991

Science in the medieval Islamic world

Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Umayyads of Córdoba, the Abbadids of Seville, the Samanids, the Ziyarids, the Buyids in Persia, the Abbasid Caliphate and beyond, spanning the period roughly between 786 and 1258. Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics, and zoology.

Aristotelian physics

Aristotelian physics is the form of natural science or natural philosophy described in the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC). In his work Physics, Aristotle intended to establish general principles of change that govern all natural bodies, both living and inanimate, celestial and terrestrial including all motion (change with respect to place), quantitative change (change with respect to size or number), qualitative change, and substantial change ("coming to be" [coming into existence, 'generation'] or "passing away" [no longer existing, 'corruption']).

Alchemy in the medieval Islamic world

Alchemy in the medieval Islamic world refers to both traditional alchemy and early practical chemistry (the early chemical investigation of nature in general) by Muslim scholars in the medieval Islamic world. The word alchemy was derived from the Arabic word كيمياء or kīmiyāʾ and may ultimately derive from the ancient Egyptian word kemi, meaning black. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Islamic conquest of Roman Egypt, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Caliphate and the Islamic civilization.