Painting as Persuasion' a Visual Defense of Alchemy in an Islamic Manuscript of the Mongol Period

a visual defense of alchemy in an islamic manuscript of the mongol period 35

An intriguing double-page painting (fig. 1) appearsnear the beginning of a manuscript made in 1339that contains a collection of Arabic and Persian al-chemical texts.1 The odd formal features of the paint-ing, as well as the elusive inscriptions on it, confrontthe viewer with visual and textual puzzles. This pa-per seeks to explain these puzzles in terms of theintellectual and artistic traditions that were familiarto the anonymous painter and calligrapher who madethe manuscript, and in terms of the purpose of thepainting. The painter and calligrapher combinedbroad cross-cultural traditions with other referencesthat were specific to the cultural context in whichthe painting was made: the Islamic lands under Mon-gol rule. This combination conveyed the purpose ofthe painting, which, I argue below, was to persuadethe viewer of the legitimacy of alchemy.

When viewed in isolation, the painting initially seemsvery strange. The formal relationship between the twopages on which it appears is puzzling. Each side isframed by a different architectural device: the rightside by a pointed arch and the left side by a post-and-lintel construction with a dome. A masonry wall withlarge blue and peach stones runs directly across thegutter where the two pages join, but it is interruptedin front of a large figure holding a tablet, and againat the doorway at the far right. Just below the wall, acontinuous blue strip unites both pages. On the rightpage, nine eagles fly through the wall supporting thearch and towards the left side of the painting. Abovethese eagles, a woman looks towards the left side froman open window, and below them, four men gesturetowards the left. The eagles, woman, and men all di-rect the viewer’s attention toward a figure who is jar-ringly different in scale and style: he looms so muchlarger than the men on the right that one of their facesis barely as big as one of his knees. Whereas the smallerfigures find their closest parallels in fourteenth-cen-tury Jalayirid Persian manuscripts,2 the larger figureon the left resembles a medieval author portrait of a

Christian evangelist. He sits on a chair and wears aheavily draped garment, and his head, slightly inclined,is perfectly round, as if his thick hair has been paintedinto the outline of a halo. He holds a tablet with anodd assortment of symbols, which include a pair ofbirds interlocked like yin and yang, mysterious goldand white circles, and a silver crescent moon. (Thismoon is now difficult to see against the black groundof the tablet because its silver pigment, tarnished withage, has darkened; but it is barely visible, directly be-tween the pointed beard of the evangelist-like figureand the white circle beneath his beard. Also somewhatdifficult to see are three faint rays of gold that descendfrom the two gold circles at the top of the oppositeside of the tablet.)

The inscriptions surrounding this tablet commenton its symbols in an elusive manner, adding textualpuzzles to the visual ones. The inscription toward thegutter above the tablet reads “They are two vapors:the light and the heavy. They are the steam and thesmoke. They are the dry and the moist. The smoke isthe dry; the steam is the moist. The smoke is the soul[al-nafs]; the steam is the spirit [al-r¢¥], and it is themoist.”3 The inscription above the tablet on the up-per left presents the following confusing numerologicalstatement: “Water, air, and fire: therefore they havedrawn it as three, to indicate thereby that it is one,within which is three. They became five in number.And the five is from two. Thus, they have said that theearth is of two substances and the water is of two na-tures. And they drew it as five.” Below the two inter-locking birds at the lower right of the tablet, anotherinscription reads “The female is the spirit [al-r¢¥],extracted from the male, carrying it, flying away withit.”4 Damage to the last long inscription, written at asteep angle near the outer red post, has made themiddle part illegible. The first part reads “The expla-nation of this black earth deems that it was white…”After several words, among which only the word for“crescent moon” is legible, this inscription continues

PERSIS BERLEKAMP

PAINTING AS PERSUASION: A VISUAL DEFENSE OF ALCHEMY INAN ISLAMIC MANUSCRIPT OF THE MONGOL PERIOD

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as follows: “… mixed into it. In it are two, and the third.The districts of the land are in its interior. They be-came five.” Inside the tablet, both white circles oncehad inscriptions that are no longer legible. The smallergold circle at the top of the left side of the tablet isinscribed “three.” The slightly larger gold circle at theupper far left corner has a longer inscription that ispartly illegible but begins “and it is one.”

The painting’s purpose of legitimizing alchemy isnot obvious at first glance, and its persuasive impactis not instantaneous. Rather, it depends on extendedconsideration in conjunction with the text of themanuscript. The significance and impact of the paint-ing unfold gradually as the text leads the readerthrough it in a specific temporal sequence. As onereads, one becomes aware of three different levels atwhich the painting relates to the text. First, it illus-trates the allegorical story, which directly precedes itin the manuscript, of how ancient alchemical knowl-edge was preserved on a tablet and then rediscoveredin an ancient Egyptian temple. Second, it serves as afrontispiece for the manuscript as a whole. It authen-ticates the entire manuscript by successfully manipu-lating the connotations of an artistic tradition ofauthor-portrait frontispieces, which by the fourteenthcentury were already well established in Islamic bookculture. Third, in the black tablet of symbols it con-tains, the painting presents a pictogram of the secretsof alchemy discussed in the text. Its full persuasiveimpact depends on the cumulative layering of thesethree levels of relationship between it and the accom-panying manuscript text, as well as on the viewer’sability to recognize the artistic and cultural referencesto which the fourteenth-century painter alluded at eachof these three levels.

Whereas the purpose of the painting can be suc-cinctly defined as the affirmation of the legitimacy ofalchemy, the artistic and intellectual traditions throughwhich the painter expressed that purpose are moredifficult to label in a single phrase. Some of thepainter’s references belong to extremely broad cross-cultural traditions, while others belong to the specificcultural context in which he worked: the Islamic landsunder Mongol rule in the first half of the fourteenthcentury. The inscriptions on the painting secure itsdate, since they are in the same hand as the colophonon folio 65a of the manuscript (fig. 2). There, theunnamed scribe records that he finished that sectionof the manuscript on the eleventh of Muharram al-Haram in the year 740 (July 19, 1339). Although there

is no documentation of where it was produced, stylis-tic considerations clearly place it in the eastern Islamicsphere under Mongol rule, and very likely, as bothErnst J. Grube and Stefano Carboni have suggested,in Baghdad.5 Examination of the calligraphy shows thata single scribe wrote out not only the inscriptions onthe painting and the text to which the colophon isattached, but also all of the other texts in the manu-script.6 The scribe and the painter (who is henceforthidentified as the “Silvery Water painter”) may or maynot have been the same person; it is not possible todetermine this. What is definite is that as a materialobject, the entire manuscript was produced at approxi-mately the same time, even though the various textsthat follow the painting were originally composed overa period of centuries.

The text that guides the reader through the paint-ing, the first of several different texts in the manu-script, was composed in the tenth century, predatingthe painting by four centuries. Its author, Ibn Umayl,wrote it in three distinct parts: an allegorical intro-duction, which bears no separate title; a poem entitledRis¸lat al-shams il¸ al-hil¸l (The Letter from the Sunto the Moon); and a commentary, al-M¸} al-waraqº wa-al-ar¤ al-najmiyya (The Silvery Water and the StarryEarth).7 Somewhat confusingly, the three parts to-gether are known by what is properly the title only ofthe third part, because the third part depends on andalways includes the previous two. I therefore refer tothe third part as “the commentary,” and follow estab-lished usage in referring to the whole text by the ab-breviated title, al-M¸} al-waraqº. As Manfred Ullmannhas noted, the paired terms of the full title echo thedesignations of mercury and sulfur in Greek: Mercurywas referred to as “watery silver” [sic], and white sul-fur as “starry earth.”8 Ibn Umayl’s title therefore al-ludes to what modern scholars call the mercury-sulfurtheory of alchemy.9

Al-M¸} al-waraqº became a classic of Islamic alchemy,and manuscripts of Arabic commentaries on it werestill being produced as late as the nineteenth century.It had been translated into Latin in the twelfth orthirteenth century, and the translation was widelydisseminated among alchemists in Europe.10 It is im-possible to understand the painting in the 1339 manu-script without reference to the tenth-century text andin turn impossible to understand al-M¸} al-waraqº with-out reference to the cross-cultural traditions of Her-metic alchemy to which it belongs.11 Yet it is also crucialto consider how the interpretation of the painter,

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Fig. 2. Colophon. Compilation of alchemical texts, probably Baghdad, 1339. Topkapæ Palace Library, A. 2075, fol. 65a. (Photo:courtesy of the Topkapæ Palace Museum, Istanbul)

henceforth identified as the Silvery Water painter, dif-fers from visual interpretations of the same text cre-ated at other times and places.

To this end, I use three related images as compara-tive lenses for viewing the Silvery Water painting. Oneof these comes from a fifteenth-century manuscriptof a text entitled Aurora Consurgens, which commentson the Latin translation of al-M¸} al-waraqº. The manu-script includes a painting illustrating Ibn Umayl’s al-legory (fig. 3).12 Another is a frontispiece of a bookprinted in 1622, which introduces the Latin transla-tion of al-M¸} al-waraqº (fig. 4).13 The third is a dia-gram of the tablet from a sixteenth-century Arabic

manuscript of al-M¸} al-waraqº (fig. 5).14 Comparisonof the Silvery Water painting with these related im-ages—an allegorical illustration, a frontispiece, anda diagram of the tablet—highlights what is exceptionalin the Silvery Water painter’s own interpretation ofIbn Umayl’s text. Some aspects of his interpretationcould conceivably have appeared in another context,but in other ways his interpretation specifically reflectsthe Perso-Mongol cultural climate in the first half ofthe fourteenth century. In this period, relations of theeastern Islamic lands with both Europe and China weregreatly intensified.

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Fig. 3. The rediscovery of alchemical knowledge. Aurora Consurgens, Vienna or Salzburg, early fifteenth century. Zentral-bibliothek Zürich, ms. Rh. 172, fol. 3r. (Photo: after Obrist, Débuts, fig. 49. Reproduced with permission of the Zentral-bibliothek Zürich)

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Fig. 4. Frontispiece to volume five of Zetzner’s Theatrum Chemicum, Argentorati, 1622. (Photo: after Stapleton and Husain,Edition of the Latin Rendering, p. 146)

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Fig. 5. Above: Arabic diagram. Ibn Umayl’s al-M¸} al-waraqº, sixteenth century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. arabe1610, fol. 3a. (Photo: negative courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris) Below: Diagram with English translationby {Ali. (Photo: after {Ali, Three Treatises, pl. 1)

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ALLEGORICAL ILLUSTRATION

Ibn Umayl begins the allegory as follows:

With Abu al-Qasim {Abd al-Rahman, the brother of Abual-Fadl Ja{far al-Nahwi, and then another time, with Ibnal-Husayn {Ali b. Ahmad b. {Umar, known as al-{Adawi,I entered into Abu Sir, the Prison of Yusuf, known asSidr wa-Ab¢ Sºr.15

The Silvery Water painter emphasizes this locationwith an inscription over the doorway at the far right,reading, “The ancient Egyptian temple [birb¸}] Sidrwa-Ab¢ Sºr.”16 Ab¢ Sºr or, as it appears in other manu-scripts, Buªºr, refers to several places in Egypt.17 Oth-er medieval Islamic allegories also often relate thatalchemical knowledge was located in Egyptian soil.18

For example, the Kit¸b sirr al-khalºqa (Book of theSecrets of Creation) of Balinus (Apollonius of Tya-na) begins with an account of how the author en-countered at Tuwana, Egypt, a statue of Hermes withan inscription saying that the secrets of creation werebelow the statue’s foot. Balinus dug under the statueand opened a subterannean chamber. He entered itand encountered an old sage grasping an emeraldtablet with those secrets.19

The topos of the rediscovery of alchemical knowl-edge through archaeological excavation in ancient soilhad clear implications for the legitimacy of that knowl-edge, suggesting that the secret knowledge the alche-mists sought must exist, since it had existed before.Long ago, it had been known by the ancient sages,and particularly by the father of alchemy, Hirmis al-Muthallath (Hermes Trismegistus);20 therefore,it must be possible to know this secret knowledgeagain.21 Yet the difficulty of rediscovering it was onlyto be expected, given the long passage of time sinceit had last been known. Furthermore, it was fitting thatthe knowledge of alchemy should be hidden in theearth, since it was the earth that most effectively pro-duced gold. A widespread alchemical idea, found notonly in Islamic and European but also in Chinese al-chemy, was that metals gestated in the earth like thefetus in the womb.22 All metals had the potential tobe born as gold, but most were born too soon or wereotherwise unable to achieve their healthiest state andwere therefore born as other, baser metals. The at-tempt of alchemists to transform base metals into goldwas only an attempt to replicate and accelerate whatnaturally occurred in the earth, which was therefore

the most suitable place for alchemical knowledge tobe located. The myth that alchemical knowledge waspreserved in the earth expressed the idea that, whilehumanity’s grasp of alchemical secrets was fleeting,the earth’s grasp of the same secrets endured.

The particular geographical localization of alchemi-cal knowledge in the earth of ancient Egypt had use-fully ambiguous connotations in the medieval Islamiccontext. One aspect of this localization was that it gavemythical expression to part of the history of Islamicalchemy, which, like alchemy in the medieval West,had actual roots in Hellenistic Egypt.23 Yet it is worthnoting that other roots of Islamic alchemy in Chinawere generally not mentioned in these allegories.24 Forlegitimizing purposes, in most periods of Islamic his-tory it made more sense to emphasize the origins ofalchemy in Egypt. Ancient Egypt was distant, foreign,and mysterious in time, yet geographic Egypt lay inthe heart of the Islamic world, plausibly accessible inspace. The balance it struck in the imagination betweenmystery and plausibility remained a reliable constant.The accessibility of China, in contrast, vacillated withhistorical shifts in political and commercial relationsalong the Silk Route.

The Silvery Water painter emphasizes the Egyptianlocation in the style of the door at the bottom right.The geometric panelling of the door contrasts sharplywith the more delicate white budding-leaf shapes thatclimb up the doorway, and with the larger-scale, lightgreen tendrils that spiral loosely on the pedimentsabove the main arch. The doorway and tiled pedimentsmost obviously suggest the contemporary architecturaldecoration of the Perso-Mongol cultural sphere inwhich they were painted. In contrast, the dark, heavypattern on the door is also compatible with the archi-tecture of the Mamluk dynasty that ruled Egypt at thesame time, and may be compared to a surviving four-teenth-century Mamluk door (fig. 6).25 In the paint-ing, the inscription over the door invites the viewerto follow Ibn Umayl on the journey he made into thetemple. By providing a door that looks Mamluk, thefourteenth-century painter marks this stage of theimaginative journey as similar to a plausible physicaljourney, in which the traveler may traverse space butnot time.

In the allegory, Ibn Umayl specifies that the tem-ple he entered was the Prison of Yusuf. Yusuf’s placein Islam was firmly established; the twelfth sura of theQur}an relates the story of how he was sold into slaveryin Egypt, imprisoned, and eventually released when

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Fig. 6. Pair of doors. Egypt, fourteenth century. Wood and ivory, 197 cm x 90 cm. Benaki Museum, inv. no. 9281. (Photo:courtesy of the Benaki Museum, Athens)

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he successfully interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream. Inthe Qur}anic telling, the importance of Yusuf’s abil-ity to interpret is emphasized: God allowed him to besold into slavery specifically so that he could learn theinterpretation of stories.26 A study by B. H. Strickermakes clear that the Prison of Yusuf was a particularancient Egyptian temple to which people from medi-eval Cairo made excursions and pilgrimages.27 Themedieval Islamic name for the temple attests to its statusas an ancient monument whose place in Islamic cul-ture was secured by the accretion of new myths. Be-cause it was recognized as ancient and culturallydifferent, yet associated with a story found in theQur}an, the Prison of Yusuf represented the placewithin Islamic culture that the defenders of alchemyclaimed for alchemy itself. The medieval Islamic in-tellectuals who opposed alchemy rejected it as un-Is-lamic and false. Its defenders claimed it was a formof the wisdom of the ancients that, along with the restof philosophy, had been confirmed by Islam.28 Indepicting the Prison of Yusuf, the painter does notvisually specify the building type but does indicate thatit belongs in an Islamic milieu by providing it with adome and an iwan.

The painter of the fifteenth-century Aurora Con-surgens illustration faced a parallel problem of assertingthe compatibility of alchemy, despite its controversialstatus, with Latin Christianity. But he addressed theproblem by depicting the ancient temple unambiguous-ly as a medieval church with a steeple tower.29 In thisway, he literally located alchemical knowledge withina church and asserted its place in Latin Christianity.

The allegory of Ibn Umayl continues:

I went towards a temple. The seekers (al-mu«¸libiyy¢n)30

opened it, and on the ceiling of the entry hall, I saw apicture of nine eagles with open wings, as if they wereflying, and with outstretched and open claws. In the clawof each of the eagles was something like a fully drawnbow that soldiers have.31

In the Silvery Water painting, the eagles are not af-fixed onto the ceiling but seem to be flying throughthe wall. Using the colors of brown, pale jade green,and white, the painter divides the nine birds intothree sets of three. His decision to distinguish thesethree sets of birds by color is provocative because,alchemically, the transformation of colors marked thetransformation of metals and other substances. Thebirds outside the temple are brown; after they flythrough the wall and enter the temple precinct their

color lightens to pale jade green, and as they approachthe sage, who literally holds the secret, they turn white.The painter’s treatment of these birds seems inspiredby the third section of al-M¸} al-waraqº, the commen-tary. There, Ibn }Umayl frequently refers to the divi-sion of nine parts of water into three thirds, sometimesassociating this division with color.

His statement, “After the disappearance of the Black-ness, the Gold will turn again into a Silvery Stone” isbecause the Blackness will become manifest on this“White Pure Earth” at the entering of the first three outof the nine parts of the “Divine Water,” and it is one-third of the nine. Then it will be whitened and theblackness will disappear.32

Thus the progression of the birds from dark brownto white gives visual form to the idea of alchemy as aprocess of purification in successive stages.

The birds in the Silvery Water painting are strikinglyunlike those in the Aurora consurgens painting, wherethey appear menacing and aggressive and are all blue—a color that, according to Barbara Obrist, is reservedthroughout that manuscript for motifs that symbol-ize quicksilver,33 or mercury. As in other publishedWestern depictions of the scene (fig. 4), they aim theirarrows either directly at the sage or at the party offigures gesturing towards him. Their bows signify theircapability and strength.34

In the Silvery Water painting, in contrast, the birdshave an almost lyrical quality. Their bows are onlyfaintly indicated, trailing delicately from their feet. Thegentle curve of each bow, ending with a loop, is echoedin the arrangement of the nine birds in formation.The painter’s decision to depict the birds in such anunthreatening manner might be linked to the Mongolunderstanding of nine as a lucky number.35

In the allegory, Ibn Umayl goes on to describe whatelse he saw in the temple:

On the wall of the gallery, to the right and left of any-one entering the temple, were pictures of people stand-ing, of most perfect form, wearing a variety of clothes,and extending their fingers and hands towards the in-side of the temple, towards the thing that was near thepillar of the gate of the hall. They were pointing to theidol who sat in the interior of the temple.36

The figures who gesture towards the sage, here spe-cifically identified as an idol, are described, as werethe birds, as pictures found inside the temple. Presum-ably, then, the text alludes to ancient Egyptian wall

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paintings. Yet, in a way that parallels his treatmentof the architectural setting, the artist has made no in-dication of the pre-Islamic, culturally foreign statusof these gesturing figures. Rather, he has dressedthem in turbans and indicated tiraz bands on theirsleeves.

The detail of tiraz bands is frequently seen in man-uscript paintings from Iraq and Syria before theMongol invasion, but then becomes less common. Al-though it is not clear exactly where these bands orig-inated,37 they loosely suggest the culture of caliphalIslam that had been centered at Baghdad. Many thatappear after the fall of Baghdad, and consequentlyof the caliphate, in 1258 are in manuscripts made inareas to the west or south, where Mongol culture hada comparatively slow or indirect impact.38 In post-conquest paintings made near the centers of Mon-gol power, their appearance often suggests culturalcontinuity stretching back to the ancient roots of Ira-nian or Islamic culture. In the paintings of the GreatMongol Sh¸hn¸ma (Book of Kings) of the 1330s, theyare worn by some of the most ancient kings, such asIskandar.39 In the paintings in the J¸mi{ al-taw¸rºkh(Compendium of Chronicles) manuscript of 1307–14, the bands tend to appear in scenes depicting sto-ries of the prophets. There, the prophets who pre-ceded Muhammad, such as Noah and Moses, areshown in Islamic dress,40 indicating that they wereMuslims in the literal sense of submitting to God’swill, even if they were from the pre-Islamic era. Incontrast, the cultural difference of non-Muslims, fromthe ancient giant {Uj to the Chinese emperors, is madevisually clear, and their lack of tiraz sleeve bands isone indication of this difference.

In the Silvery Water painting, therefore, the cos-tumes with tiraz bands worn by the figures on theright are significant. The painter had other stylisticoptions available to him, as is clear from his depic-tion of the idol. By representing the smaller men asMuslims in a contemporary architectural setting, theartist invites the contemporary Muslim reader to iden-tify with them. Whatever access they have to the se-crets of the temple, the reader may also hope to gain.

The idol on the left, by contrast, is clearly foreign,and it is difficult to place him in time. Bishr Farèssuggests that he resembles a Syrian-Byzantine idol.41

Surprisingly, the drapery folds of his green robe seemstylistically closer to drapery in the manuscript paint-ing of England and France around 1200 than to geo-graphically less remote Byzantine examples.42 The

formal similarities between the Hermes/sage figurein the Silvery Water painting and the image of Godholding the cosmos in a French moralizing Bible ofthe early thirteenth century are striking (fig. 7).43 Itseems extremely unlikely that the Silvery Water paintercould have intended such a heretical allusion. Yet,although this suggestion must remain purely conjec-tural, it is possible that the painter came across a sim-ilar image, in which the depiction of the cosmosshowed celestial bodies.44 The painter may have con-sidered the depicted “author” of such a cosmos asuitable model for his purposes because he, too, hadto show an author of an object visualized in terms ofsuns and moons. Alternatively, he may have chosensuch a model because he wanted a particularly “for-eign” style. Perhaps the full hair and beard in such apainting reminded him of ancient classical statues andeffectively connoted for him the great antiquity ofthe sculptural idol he was trying to represent.

What could explain the Silvery Water painter’saccess to such a model? The Ilkhanid court exchangedembassies with the English and the French, whosecommunications, since they saw this relationship large-ly through the prism of the Crusades, often had areligious dimension. The English and the French sentmonks and chaplains in their embassies to the Mon-gol court because they wanted to win the Mongols’allegiance to the Christian cause; the Mongols on theirpart sent Christian monks from the East to Europe,presumably because they thought that the Europe-ans were likely to receive them favorably. Further-more, the Dominican order was well established atvarious Mongol capitals, such as Sultaniya, Tabriz, andMaragha.45 Since these monks presumably traveledwith Bibles and possibly other books, there would havebeen ample opportunity for the transport of booksin general, and of Bibles in particular, from North-ern Europe to the Mongol Islamic lands.

The stylistic elusiveness of the sage/idol figure inthe Silvery Water painting is appropriate, given thatlegends surrounding Hirmis Muthallath, or HermesTrismegistus, with whom the sage in the allegory wouldcertainly have been identified,46 made him an elu-sive figure. According to tradition, Hermes Trismegis-tus had inscribed the secrets of alchemy on an emer-ald tablet and preserved it underground so that futuregenerations might seek it out.47 In different culturalcontexts, he represented different amalgams of indi-viduals. According to a Hellenistic model, he repre-sented the identification of Hermes with Mercury and

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Fig. 7. The Creator forming the world with a compass. Bible moralisée. Paris, ca. 1208–18. Wien, Österreichische National-bibliothek, Cod. 1179, fol. 1v. (Photo: courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)

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with the Egyptian god Thoth. In one widely dissemi-nated Islamic model, he was three individuals, of whomthe first—identified with both Akhnukh (Enoch) andIdris—built the ancient Egyptian monuments andpreserved knowledge within them to protect it fromthe Great Flood. The other two individuals with whomHermes Trismegistus was identified in the same tra-dition both lived after the flood and spent at leastpart of their lives in Egypt.48 These were combinedinto the single figure of Hirmis Muthallath, who isspecifically quoted in Ibn Umayl’s text so many timesthat an entire article has been devoted to those quo-tations.49 The Silvery Water painter managed to pow-erfully suggest the antiquity and foreignness of thiscomposite figure, without identifying him with anyspecific time or place.

The Aurora Consurgens painting shows no such sty-listic distinction between the observers and the sage.Obrist suggests that the painter portrays the sage asalive, implying the vitality of alchemy itself.50 Not onlydoes the Aurora Consurgens painter seem to avoid pre-senting the sage/Hermes figure as the idol with whichhe is identified in the text, but even more surpris-ingly, he introduces another unmentioned idol:51 theflask of gold at the center of the painting, elevatedto idol status by its placement on the column.52 Thefigures at the right pay more attention to this flaskthan to the sage—that is, more attention to the ulti-mate goal of alchemy, as represented by gold, thanto the secrets of how to reach it.53

In the allegory, Ibn Umayl describes the idol asfollows:

He was situated to the left hand of whoever desired toenter the Hall, facing the person who entered from thegallery. He was in a chair like the chairs of physicians,which was separate from the idol.54

In the Islamic lands, Europe, and China, the broadgoals of alchemy often extended beyond the perfec-tion of metals into gold, to the purification of thehuman body.55 Thus it is absolutely appropriate thatthe father of alchemy should have sat on a physician’schair, and the Silvery Water painter has obliginglyprovided one, the straight golden lines of which standout clearly against the blue and green polygonal tilesof the floor. In the Aurora Consurgens painting, in con-trast, the sage/Hermes figure sits on the floor. Sincechairs were common furniture in medieval Europe,the association of the chair with medicine apparentlylost its resonance there.

The allegory continues with Ibn Umayl’s descrip-tion of the tablet:

In his lap, resting on his arms, his hands extended onhis knees, was a stone slab (bal¸«a), separate from him.The length of it was about one cubit, and the breadthabout one span. The fingers of both his hands were bentbehind the slab, as if holding it. The slab was like anopen book (muª¥af) exhibited to all who entered as ifto suggest that they should look at it.56

By explicitly comparing the sage’s tablet to a book,Ibn Umayl presents him as an authority from whomit is appropriate to learn. According to Islamic Neo-platonism, the wisest of the ancients had arrived byreason at truths that were compatible with Qur}anicrevelation. These wise ancients would have readilyproclaimed their acceptance of Islam had it been avail-able to them.57 By choosing green, the Prophet Mu-hammad’s favorite color, for the sage’s robe, the SilveryWater painter suggests that the sage was such a man.At the same time the color of the robe also recalls thegreen of the emerald tablet on which Hermes inscribedhis secrets.

ALLEGORICAL ILLUSTRATION ANDFRONTISPIECE

It is interesting that what Ibn Umayl says he saw inthe temple was not the sage himself but an idol—al-most certainly a sculptural representation of the sage—and not actual observers, but images of observers. Tounderstand the relevance of Ibn Umayl’s encounterwith the visual images in the allegory, one must firstrecognize the culturally established type to which hisdescription refers. Within the allegory, when Ibn Umaylenters the ancient temple, what he encounters is amonumental author portrait, displaced from its usualphysical context of a page in a book and renderedpartly three-dimensional in an architectural space.Though the images of the birds are superfluous to theidentification of this image type, the other images de-scribed correspond to it neatly.

Ibn Umayl’s description emphasizes the points ofcorrespondence between what he sees in the templeand the author-portrait type; he is clearly determinedto make sure that the reader understands the refer-ence. Late antique author portraits generally depictan evangelist sitting in a chair, holding his gospel. Inthe medieval and early modern Islamic and Europe-an frontispieces that developed from this tradition,

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authors other than evangelists also held their books.58

Ibn Umayl not only explicitly specifies that the sagesits in a chair but goes on to belabor the point thatthe slab is like an open book. Later, he refers to thefigures who gesture towards the sage as al-mu«¸libiyy¢n.This term has posed a challenge for translators,59 butby implication it refers to people who seek something,and it comes from the same root as the word for stu-dent, «¸lib, a seeker after knowledge. As Eva Hoff-man explains, in both late antique and Islamic author-portrait frontispieces, the author’s students sometimesappear with the author.60 In the Silvery Water paint-ing, the narrative of the allegory is reconciled withthe description of the frontispiece, so that both arevisible together. The figures referred to as al-mu«¸li-biyy¢n, who gesture towards the sage, not only aredressed in a manner appropriate for students but alsooccupy the space on the page generally associatedwith them.61

Given the conventional implications of author por-traits, the monumental one that Ibn Umayl encoun-ters in the allegory implies both that the sage wasthe authentic author of the tablet and that the tabletitself was an authentic presentation of its author’sknowledge. In addition, the unusual physical contextof the monumental, partly sculptural portrait—whichIbn Umayl encounters in the architectural space ofthe temple described in the allegory, rather than inthe codicological space of the book where the read-er later encounters a representation of it—empha-sizes the exceptional way in which the secrets of al-chemy were supposedly preserved. Rather than havingbeen written down in a manuscript, the secrets wereengraved on a tablet kept in an ancient temple, high-lighting the antiquity of the knowledge itself whilesimultaneously emphasizing the reliable manner ofits preservation.

Even without any accompanying image, the textitself would have brought an author portrait to themind of a reader in both the Islamic East and theEuropean West, since the two regions shared the samelate antique artistic heritage. Although the AuroraConsurgens painter did not exploit this reference,62

the Silvery Water painter and the maker of the 1622frontispiece did. They responded to the literary allu-sion to a frontispiece in the allegory with images thatfunctioned as actual frontispieces. (Another publishedexample, dated 1605,63 shares the basic compositionallayout of the 1622 frontispiece.)64

The resulting visual layering, the images of the

image containing an image, paralleled the textuallayers of commentaries on commentaries and relat-ed texts that appeared in alchemical manuscripts. Forexample, the 1339 manuscript opened with the Sil-very Water painting and with Ibn Umayl’s al-M¸} al-waraqº, which included the introductory allegory; apoem that elaborated on the tablet described in theallegory; and a commentary on the tablet, allegory,and poem. The manuscript then continued with sev-eral other short texts, all related in various ways tothe first. These represented other writings by IbnUmayl, 65 by his sources,66 and by his successors inthe alchemical tradition.67 Similarly, Aurora Consurgenshad two parts: in the first, quotations from the Bible,framed as alchemical allegories, were supplementedby passages from Ibn Umayl, while the second wassimultaneously a commentary on the first part andon Ibn Umayl’s treatise. His treatise was also the mainsource of the second part.68

Although this habit of layering texts was not uniqueto alchemy, it had a special significance for alchemistsbecause of what they saw as their path to uncoveringthe secrets of material and spiritual purification.69 Likemedieval scholars in general, they revered the knowl-edge of past authorities; but for alchemists in partic-ular, the line of past authorities and the cumulativelayers of commentaries by them and about them werethe path to the ancient sages who had once, longago, possessed this secret knowledge. The layers ofcommentaries and interrelated texts can thus be seenas the alchemists’ peculiar archaeology of knowledge.

The distinctions between textual layers often col-lapsed. Ibn Umayl’s al-M¸} al-waraqº was both the mainsource of the second half of the Aurora Consurgensand also the object of its commentary. A similar col-lapsing of distinctions occurred at a visual level, inimages of the allegorical author portrait. While thetraditional physical context for an author portrait wasthe manuscript, the author portrait in the allegorywas not bound within a manuscript but found on andbetween walls; yet numerous images of that allegori-cal author portrait were images in books.

In their conventional physical context within boundbooks, the placement of both Western and Islamicauthor portraits was significant, indicating that theimage pertained to whatever text followed. As evan-gelist portraits typically introduced gospels, authorportraits appeared as frontispieces to texts by theauthors they depicted. The clearly deliberate place-ment of the Silvery Water painting near the front of

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the 1339 manuscript implied an authorial connec-tion, if an indirect one, between the sage depictedand the book as a whole, and thereby acknowledgedthe importance of Hermes to alchemy in general. Thepainting appears on folios 2b and 3a, immediatelyafter the allegory it illustrates, on 1b and 2a: oneobvious place for it, but not the only one. In severalother Arabic manuscripts of the same text that de-pict the image held by the sage but not the entireallegory, diagrams of the image appear later, nearpoetic couplets pertaining to them. Ibn Umayl’s textimplies that this later location was the default loca-tion for any image of the tablet. He says:

I have drawn a picture for you of that tablet and of thesefigures and images that were on it, in its proper placein that poem under the couplets that refer to these im-ages.70

In the 1339 manuscript, however, there is no imageof the tablet under the poetic couplets that refer toit. Instead, the painter and calligrapher have deliber-ately placed a painting that includes the tablet imme-diately after the prose allegory, and early enough inthe text block so that it appears in the conventionalfrontispiece location of an author portrait.

In the 1622 frontispiece, the author portrait isemphasized and the narrative of the allegory de-em-phasized. The large body of the sage is at the centerof the image. The tablet he holds is hinged to re-semble an open book. There are ten birds, as mention-ed at the end of the Latin version of the commen-tary,71 rather than the nine of the narrative allegoricalintroduction. Birds and observers mentioned in theallegory flank the sage, and like the perspectival beamsand floor tiles above and below him, they act as for-mal devices for framing him. The image has no tem-poral direction that corresponds to the unfolding ofthe narrative. Whereas the Aurora Consurgens paint-ing, like Latin, reads from left to right, and the Sil-very Water painting, like Arabic and Persian, readsfrom right to left, the 1622 frontispiece is meant tobe perceived at once and from the center. The fig-ure’s monkish costume distinguishes him from theobservers, further drawing the viewer’s attention tohim.

Hoffman has explained that in Islamic book cul-ture, the frontispiece formula, in which the authorand his work are depicted, was often used to intro-duce texts by classical or late antique authors.72 Theunconventional style in which the Hermes figure is

depicted not only draws attention to him but alsoemphasizes his antiquity. The Silvery Water painteruses the frontispiece type to emphasize both the am-biguous position of the classical heritage in Islamiclearning and the ultimate authority of the text in themanuscript. Both the theme of cultural difference inthe genealogy of knowledge and the conventions forexpressing it visually were already part of the specif-ically Islamic tradition of author-portrait frontispiecepainting as it had developed by the thirteenth centu-ry. One precedent for emphasizing this point throughstylistic difference is a frontispiece in a thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript of De Materia Medica ofDioscorides, which Hoffman analyzes in detail (fig.8).73 She shows that in this painting, the image ofDioscorides on the right seems to have been copiedfrom a middle-Byzantine painting of the EvangelistMatthew, and is thereby stylistically marked as pre-Islamic. Dioscorides extends his arm to beckon twofigures, who approach him carrying books. These fig-ures, identified as his students presenting their copiesof his text for approval, wear turbans and robes withtiraz bands that mark them as Muslim. As Hoffmandemonstrates, the image gives visual form to the ideaof Islamic scholars as heirs to the classical tradition.

In the thirteenth-century Dioscorides frontispiece,the author depicted represents the author of the textof the manuscript, and the book depicted representsthat manuscript. In the Silvery Water painting, this isnot the case. The sage/Hermes figure is not the di-rect author of the texts in the manuscript, but ratherthe authority behind the direct authors—the Ur-au-thor, so to speak. He is the one whose knowledgethe authors, and particularly Ibn Umayl, aspire toreveal. What he holds is not the text that follows butrather a tablet with images that are supposedly un-derstandable in conjunction with that text.

ALLEGORICAL ILLUSTRATION, FRONTISPIECE,AND PICTOGRAM

The substitution of a tablet with images for a bookwith text, as dictated by the frontispiece image type,is partly explained by the ambiguous nature in Her-metic tradition of the original emerald tablet, whichaccording to some accounts had images but accord-ing to others had text. As Obrist explains, this ambi-guity makes sense, given that the original, having beenwritten by the builder of the pyramids, would pre-sumably have been engraved with hieroglyphs; there-

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Fig. 8. Frontispiece showing Dioscorides and his students. Materia Medica. Thirteenth century. Topkapæ Palace Library, A.2127, fols. 1b–2a. (Photo: courtesy of the Topkapæ Palace Museum, Istanbul)

fore, the question of whether it was text or imagewas not, and could not be, resolved.74 For Ibn Umayl,the emerald tablet is much like a pictogram contain-ing ancient images readable as symbols. In his alle-gory he surrounds the tablet with pictures and hiero-glyphs, which of course are simultaneously text andimage.

Next to the seated one, in the hall (riw¸q)75 where theimage was situated, were pictures of different things andlines in the hieroglyphic script.76

In one sense, since the tablet is the object in whichthe secret is supposedly revealed, its discovery is theclimactic conclusion of the excavation. The tablet isclearly visible in the Silvery Water painting, in the earlyfifteenth-century Aurora Consurgens image, in the 1622printed frontispiece, and in the diagram from the six-

teenth-century Arabic manuscript. The half of thetablet first described in the text appears, in the cor-responding image, on the side that would be read first:in the Arabic and Persian manuscripts, the right side;and in the Latin books, the left.

In the Silvery Water painting, the masonry wall withpeach and blue stones breaks dramatically away infront of the tablet, emphasizing that the viewer is grant-ed direct access. Since each of the numerous layersof images in the allegory and painting that frame thetablet leads somewhere, the expectation that the tabletshould likewise lead somewhere is firmly established.That “somewhere” is clearly identified in Ibn Umayl’sclaim that it contains the secret of alchemy.

Yet in another sense the tablet requires an entire-ly new excavation into the layers of alchemical mean-ing. It presents the secret through yet another set of

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allegories, this time astrological and numerological,according to Ibn Umayl’s description, which beginsas follows:

The tablet in his lap was divided into two halves by aline down the middle. On one half of it towards thebottom was a picture of two birds having their breaststo one another. On one of them both wings were cutoff, and the other had both wings. Each of them heldfast to the tail of the other by its beak, as if the flyingbird wished to fly with the mutilated bird, and the muti-lated bird wished to keep the flying bird with itself. Thesetwo birds of the same kind, which held each other back,became a single circle, a symbol of “Two in One.”77

In the Silvery Water painting, the two interlocking birdsclearly belong to the same species as the nine birdson the right. Although the wings of one are spreadopen and the wings of the other clipped, both birdsare depicted in the same scale; the feet of each onereach for the other in the same way; and each bitesthe other’s tail to the same degree. In the Silvery Waterpainting, the carefully balanced image of the two birds,interlocking with Escher-like precision, recalls theChinese symbol of yin and yang.

I know of no other representation of the tabletthat presents the two birds as yin and yang. In theAurora Consurgens painting, the birds are unevenlymatched: the upper, blue bird clearly overpowers thesmaller white one. In the 1622 printed frontispiece,the birds are of the same scale, but their pose doesnot suggest a circle. In the Arabic diagram, wherethe abstracted symbol of the birds appears at the lowerright, they appear like two links of a ring that cir-cumscribes an empty inner space.

The suggestion that the Silvery Water painter in-tended the two birds on the tablet to resemble yinand yang is not so far-fetched as it might at first seem.In Chinese alchemy, pairs of ingredients were, in thewords of Nathan Sivin, “yin and yang with respect toeach other.”78 Furthermore, yin and yang were at thebasis of Taoist “inner alchemy,” whose adepts aimedfor purification of their own bodies, minds, and spir-its, and which flourished in this period.79 Because ofthe Mongols, cultural exchange between the Islamicworld and China was particularly vibrant,80 and a well-studied account of a Chinese alchemist’s travels inIslamic Central Asia dates from this period.81

Ibn Umayl may or may not have understood thetwo interlocking birds as yin and yang; a conclusion

on this point must await more studies about Islamic-Chinese cultural relations in the tenth century. Yetan early fourteenth-century reader, whose opportu-nities to see the yin and yang symbol can easily beimagined, would quite plausibly have recognized thatsymbol in Ibn Umayl’s description of the two birdsas a circle that symbolized “Two in One.” The com-mentary would also have supported this interpreta-tion, since it describes the birds as male and female.82

The inscription on the sixteenth-century Arabic dia-gram also labels them as male and female, but theinscription just below the birds on the Silvery Waterpainting goes further, emphasizing their mutual de-pendence: “The female is the spirit [al-r¢¥] extract-ed from the male, carrying it, flying away with it.”The image itself leaves little doubt about the paint-er’s interpretation of Ibn Umayl’s words.

As yin and yang, the two birds connote several ad-ditional associated polarities: not just male-female,but also dark-light, dry-moist, and hot-cold. The samepolarities pertained to the planets, which in medievalWestern, Islamic, and Chinese alchemy were symbolsof different metals, although the symbolic associationsvaried across traditions and within each tradition.

In the allegory, the description of the tablet con-tinues:

At the head of the flying one was a circle and, abovethese two birds, at the top of the tablet close to thefingers of the image, was the representation of the cres-cent moon. At the side of the moon was a circle, simi-lar to the circle near the two birds at the bottom.83

In the Aurora Consurgens rendition of the tablet, thepainter has included a crescent and a circle above thebirds and a circle below them. All three of these ob-jects share a dark color, creating an affinity betweenthem. The crescent and the adjacent circle are alsosimilar in scale, suggesting that the artist interpretedthem as two moons, and inscriptions on the Arabicdiagram identify them as such. As for the 1622 print,it has neither colors nor inscriptions to indicate theirrelationship. In the Silvery Water painting, however,the circle above the birds is gold; the tiny crescentdirectly to its left—now tarnished, dark, and difficultto see—was once bright silver. The painter has inter-preted these as the golden sun and the silver crescentmoon. The inscription above them emphasizes thepolarities they represent, as metals and as planets.“They are two vapors—the light and the heavy. They

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are the steam and the smoke. They are the dry andthe moist. The smoke is the dry; the steam is the moist.The smoke is the soul [al-nafs]; the steam is the spirit[al-r¢¥], and it is the moist.” Ibn Umayl’s poem, Ris¸latal-shams il¸ al-hil¸l, also presents the sun and moonin terms of polarities. There, the moon proclaims: “Iam the soft cold moon/ And you are the hot rigidsun.”84

Within alchemy generally, the male-female polari-ty was linked to the idea that metals were born ofthe earth. In accordance with this idea, alchemy wasalso understood as a process of conjugal reproductioninvolving the union of male and female.85 The femalefigure peering from the window in the right half ofthe Silvery Water painting is not mentioned in IbnUmayl’s allegory. She may, however, have been in-cluded to emphasize this male-female polarity thatwas poetically expressed in the Ris¸lat al-shams il¸ al-hil¸l.86 Her inclusion with the male figures in thepainting also offers an indirect link to the Persiantext on the gestation and birth of metals from theearth on folio 76a of the manuscript.

Ibn Umayl’s allegory continues without direct com-ment on the remaining circle of the first side of thetablet. In the diagram from the sixteenth-centuryArabic manuscript, an inscription on this circle ex-plains that it is the source of the two birds, which arethe male and the female. In the Silvery Water paint-ing, this circle also bears an inscription, but unfortu-nately the pigments have eroded to illegibility. In theallegory, Ibn Umayl’s description of the first half ofthe tablet concludes as follows:

The total was five—three at the bottom, that is, two birdsand the circle, and, above, the figure of the crescentmoon and the other circle.87

This explanation of how the first half of the tablet addsup to a total of five is clear.

Ibn Umayl then proceeds to describe the secondhalf of the tablet—the side to the reader’s left in theimages from Islamic manuscripts, and to the right inthe images from Latin books. As for the first half, hedescribes its astrological symbols in numerologicalterms that are supposed to add up to five.

On the other half, at the top of the tablet, close to thefingers of his hands, was a picture of a sun with two rays,as if they were a symbol of “Two in One.” Next to themwas a picture of another sun, with one descending ray.These are three things; I mean, three lights. The raysof the “Two in One”88 descend down towards the bot-

tom of the tablet, to a black circle, of which one-thirdis divided off. Thus it became two-thirds and one-third.One-third of it had the form of the crescent moonbecause the interior of it is white, not filled with black.The black circle surrounds it. This picture of the twoof them is the picture of “Two in One.” That which isat the bottom is “One of Two.” Those two are the blackcircle and the crescent moon, which is a portion [ofit]. And [there are] two suns at the top, I mean thepicture of “Two in One,” and the single sun, which isthe picture of “One in One.” So these are also fivethings.89

How the second side of the tablet as described addsup to five is very confusing until one realizes thatthe text poses the same addition problem twice, withthe different terms of the sum presented in two dif-ferent orders. First, the problem is posed as follows:The two rays emanating from the first sun, and theone ray emanating from the other sun, should be addedthe two parts of the circle below (these uneven partsare, first, the one-third, and, second, the two-thirds):2 + 1 + 2 = 5. Then, starting with the sentence, “Thatwhich is at the bottom is ‘One of Two,’” the problemis stated again in reverse order. In the Arabic dia-gram of the tablet, the symbols on the second sideare labeled with numerals. In each case the first nu-meral indicates the numerical value of the symbol,confirming this reading of the problem (fig. 5). Thesun with two rays is labeled “2 in 1;” the sun with thesingle ray is labeled “1 in 1;” and the circle below islabeled “2 in 1.” The parts of the second (right) sideof the diagram in the Aurora Consurgens painting canalso be counted as five in this way, by counting thedivisions of the lower circle by color—one silver partand one gold part—instead of counting the two sil-ver and one gold faces.90 In the printed 1622 frontis-piece, the rays are not indicated.

In the Silvery Water painting, it is indeed possibleto count five things on the left side of the tablet byadding the three faint golden rays extending fromthe suns to the two parts of the sphere below them.91

The inscription to the left of the tablet, near the redpole, includes a reference to “two and the third” thatseems to refer to the division of the lower sphereinto one section of two-thirds and a second sectionof the remaining one-third. But the inscription abovethe left side of the tablet seems to complicate thematter. Disconcertingly, it reads, “Water, air, and fire.Therefore they drew it as three, to indicate therebythat it is one, within which is three. They became

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five in number. And the five is from two. Thus, theyhave said that the earth is of two substances and thewater is of two natures. And they drew it as five.”

The key to this puzzling inscription is to recog-nize that the calligrapher alludes in quick successionto three different ways of reckoning the tablet’s nu-merological significance, without attempting to rec-oncile them. Each of these apparently contradictoryways of counting the tablet has its own basis in theallegory or commentary.

First, the calligrapher interprets the entire left sideof the tablet, which has two suns and one circle be-low, as an expression of three in one. This reflectsthe idea, mentioned repeatedly in the commentary,that the divine water is of three natures. Then hegoes on to mention that the same three pictorial el-ements also add up to five. As explained above, thishas a basis in the description of the tablet in the al-legory, according to which the two rays of the firstsun, the one ray of the second sun, and the two partsof the circle below make five. Finally, in the expres-sion “five is from two,” the calligrapher alludes tothe idea that there are two sides of the tablet, eachequaling five. This idea is connected to the saying“The earth is of two substances and the water is oftwo natures,” which Ibn Umayl interprets in the com-mentary as referring generally to the idea of two partsof a single whole, and specifically, to the two parts ofone whole alchemical operation, represented by thesingle tablet divided into two halves:

“The earth is of two substances and the water is of twonatures.” That is the operation of the “whiteness” andthe “redness,” and it is one operation. They have calledit two operations. Do you not see that the first opera-tion [“the whiteness”] is from five—two above and threebelow; and the second operation, “the redness,” is fromfive—three above and two below? So the operation of“the whiteness” is the first half—it is first. And theoperation of “the redness” is the second half. It is oneoperation. They have called it the two operations, inaccordance with what I have portrayed, just as the sagedrew it.92

The connection between the statement “Five is fromtwo” and the reference to the two natures of waterappears again in a short passage included just afterthe introductory allegory in the 1339 manuscript butomitted from other manuscripts of the text. Thispassage also refers to the triple nature of water. Itreads:

This pertains to the explication of the pictures. Water,air, fire—they named it water of two natures, becausethe five is from two, I mean from male and female,93

and their counterparts, which are salting (al-tamlº¥) andthe three… suns. They are all one thing. It is one wa-ter within which are three natures—water, air, and fire.So he portrayed it as three; he indicated it by this. Andthis is the triple water. That is, that it is one, and it istwo, and it is three.94

The initial objection that the numerological inscrip-tion above the left side of the tablet is internally self-contradictory becomes irrelevant, given that the ulti-mate substance, the divine water, has simultaneousnumerological values of one, two, and three: it is onewater, yet has been called a water of two natures (asHermetic secrets are expressed on the two halves ofa single tablet) and also has the three natures of water,air, and fire. In this context, where symbols havemultiple referents, it is conceivable that the calligra-pher may have decided to emphasize the parallelsbetween the divine water and the sun with two rayson the tablet. In the commentary, Ibn Umayl saysthat one word may have two or three meanings, andthat water is fire.95 The sun with two rays has multi-ple values—as a constituent of three it is one, and asa constituent of five it is two. All that is left to makethis sun parallel to the comment that the divine wa-ter “is one, and two, and three” is to give this sun thevalue of three, and perhaps this is why it is inscribedwith the word for “three.”

In the sixteenth-century Arabic diagram, the twosides of the tablet are labeled simply “first operation”and “second operation.” These labels are clear, butthey obscure the idea of parts constituting a singlewhole. The more complex inscription by the SilveryWater calligrapher at the upper left of the tablet isbased on the idea that the numerological values ofthe tablet and its parts are in flux.

The ultimate identity of the singular and the plu-ral was, after all, the core theme of alchemical thought.Base metals could become gold because the numer-ous metals of the world were ultimately of one essen-tial substance. Hirmis/Hermes, the father of alche-my, had an identity of three-in-one. Metals, planets,people, and everything else were connected by auniversal sympathy of matter. Within the Islamic Neo-platonic framework that formed a broad intellectualbackdrop for Islamic alchemy, everything in the world,including planets and metals, had emanated from asingle source. Since separate things were ultimately

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unified, they could merge, collapse, divide internal-ly, and transform; this was the basic idea upon whichthe legitimacy of alchemy ultimately depended.

In the allegory, Ibn Umayl concludes the numero-logical discussion of the tablet by announcing a mo-mentous coincidence, resounding with unspecifiedsignificance:

The total is ten, according to the number of those [nine]eagles and the [one] black earth!96

Indeed! The finality and apparent transparency of thisconclusion seem somehow to confirm the deep im-port of Ibn Umayl’s voyage through the temple, theauthority of the sage whose representation he encoun-ters, and the validity of the tablet itself. The sentencereverberates through the cumulative effects of the vari-ous roles of the Silvery Water painting vis-à-vis thetext—as allegorical illustration, author-portrait fron-tispiece, and pictogram, all of which work togetherto legitimize the claim that the manuscript holds thesecrets of alchemy.

It is no accident that the final answer to the seriesof sums is ten. In the system we now call “base ten,”which was of course the system then in use, ten isnot only ten units of one, but also a single unit often. The initial numerological building blocks of thetablet are symbols of one and of two in one, whichultimately resolve into a single unit of ten. The tab-let’s complex numerology continuously fluctuatesbetween singularity and plurality. Ten, being bothten units of one and one unit of ten, represents thisfluctuation between singularity and plurality in a waythat other numbers, such as nine or twelve, do not.

The imagery of the Silvery Water painting, like theunusual inscriptions upon it, can be seen as a medi-tation on the whole text that eloquently expressesthis theme. The painting expresses the painter’s lay-ered interpretations of al-M¸} al-waraqº, just as theinscriptions on the painting express the calligrapher’slayered interpretations of the tablet. The Silvery Waterpainter had to find a way to give the reader of themanuscript direct access to the pictogram of the tab-let without compromising his simultaneous presen-tation of sage-as-author and of an allegory includingother figures in the temple. The posture of the sage/Hermes figure, particularly the repainting of his legs,shows how the painter has wrestled with the formalconflict posed by the two audiences of the tablet. Thesage’s proper right knee, now bent inwards towardsthe gutter, was originally positioned so that the sage

would have more fully faced the viewer of the manu-script. In the painter’s revised version, the sage’s lowerbody is oriented towards the audience mentioned theallegory, but from the waist up he faces Ibn Umayl’saudience—the readers of the book—and reveals thetablet to them. This was an innovative and somewhatrisky solution, given that the subjects in author-por-traits were conventionally usually shown from eitherthe front or the side, but not both. The distinctivestyle of the figure, the way he presents the tablet likea book, and the chair on which he sits neverthelessensure that he remains clearly identifiable as an au-thor type. In the end, the painter was able to pro-duce an image that operates simultaneously as alle-gorical illustration, frontispiece, and pictogram. Allthese layers give the painting a density of meaningthat suggests through its very richness the legitimacyof alchemy.

Ibn Umayl comments on the purpose of the im-age of the tablet as follows:

I have expounded all these things to you—may Godcontinue to preserve your honor—and I have explainedthem in the poem that follows [The Letter from the Sunto the Moon]. This was through the grace of God to-wards me—may His name be sanctified!—so that youmay pause at this97 and meditate upon it…. I have alsoexplained and elucidated the matter of those ten forms.I have expressed them plainly after my poem, after pass-ing on from such open explication as is possible in po-etry, so that what was hidden by that learned one shouldbecome apparent to you.98

Since historical sources yield very few explicit discus-sions of the role of images in Islamic painting, this isa remarkable passage. Modern scholarship maintainsthat the role of images in Islamic scientific manu-scripts is didactic: that the images are meant to ex-plain and teach the knowledge most essentially con-tained in the text. Here an author of a text containingan image (in many manuscripts just the diagram ofthe tablet) tells us that the image contains knowledgeand requires extensive explication in words. If therole of the image is didactic, it is not didactic in theusual sense: it does not explain, clarify, or remind.To learn from this manuscript is to grapple with itspuzzles, and the image of the tablet is the core, theessence, of those puzzles.

Yet even as a puzzle, the most important functionof any image of the tablet Ibn Umayl describes is tolegitimize alchemy by holding out the promise that

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its secrets exist. The Silvery Water painting as a wholeenhances this underlying purpose; by depicting dis-covery, it legitimizes the claim that there is indeed adiscoverable secret. This was the foremost argumentthat Islamic alchemists used to defend their art inwords.99 The Silvery Water painter gave the argumentits visual expression.

CONCLUSION

When compared to three other closely related images,the Silvery Water painting stands out in two ways. First,it operates simultaneously and with exceptional con-sistency as allegorical illustration, author-portrait fron-tispiece, and pictogram. Second, it showcases thedifferent cultural strands within Islamic alchemy as itexisted under Mongol rule in 1339.

The consistency with which the Silvery Water paint-ing operates sets it apart from the three other close-ly related images considered above. The combinationof allegorical illustration, author-portrait frontispiece,and pictogram is clearly suggested in Ibn Umayl’stext, which stages an encounter with an architectur-al, painted, and sculpted author-portrait mentionedin the allegory and also describes an image-within-an-image. Two of the other representations consid-ered here, the Aurora Consurgens painting and the 1622printed frontispiece, visually express aspects of thiscombination, but not with the comprehensiveness ofthe Silvery Water painting. The Aurora Consurgenspainting presents the image-within-the-image but isnot a frontispiece. The 1622 print depicts the author-figure with a hinged, book-like tablet, within a framesuggested by the allegory, but both the illustrationof the allegory and the depiction of the symbols onthe tablet seem secondary. The success with whichthe Silvery Water painter combined these three lay-ers of relationship to the text in a formally appealingimage may offer insight into how and why it remainedan object of interest beyond its original context.100

Another distinctive aspect of the Silvery Waterpainting is the degree to which the painter showcas-es the different cultural strands of Islamic alchemy;he reveals a clear awareness of its heritage in the tra-ditions of pre-Islamic Egypt and of its connectionswith Chinese alchemy. Even as his painting claims alegitimate place for non-Islamic traditions within Is-lamic culture, it clearly differentiates between whatis Islamic and what is not.

In the century following the Mongol conquest,cultural traditions from East and West merged andcollided on a daily basis. Prior to the conquest, thepopulation in the eastern Islamic lands already formeda diverse society that included Persian-speaking Turksand Arabic-speaking Persians who studied translationsof Indian and Hellenistic books. To this, the Mon-gols added not only themselves, but also other eth-nic groups (from as far away as China) that they re-settled in Islamic cities. Western Europeans also movedto the new Mongol capitals. For individuals who livedin this violent era, reconciling these diverse traditionswas often key to survival. The situation in Iraq wasparticularly precarious in 1339, when the Ilkhaniddynasty that had ruled from Iran was dissolving, andHasan-i Buzurg, a member of the Jalayirid familydescended from a Mongol tribe, was establishing hisown base at Baghdad. Not only was the power struc-ture in transition, but Iraq, which had been ruled asa province since the third quarter of the thirteenthcentury, suddenly found itself the political center ofan upstart dynasty hoping to take advantage of thetroubles of its predecessor. Produced in and for anunstable world that was forced to struggle to recon-cile colliding cultural, artistic, and intellectual tradi-tions, the Silvery Water painting legitimized alche-my, partly by showcasing the various different culturalstrands within Islamic alchemy in a manner that im-plied their ultimate compatibility while recognizingtheir differences. This purpose could easily be appliedretroactively to the words in Ibn Umayl’s commentary,written at a very different historical moment:

You see their differences of expression, but yet the mean-ing is one.101

In the year 1339, when the Silvery Water paintingwas being produced, the controversy that surround-ed alchemy was very much alive in Islamic intellectu-al life. Ibn Taymiyya, whose voluminous and influen-tial writings included attacks on the occult sciencesin general and on alchemy in particular, had diedonly a decade earlier, in 1328. His student, Ibn Qayyimal-Jawziyya (d. 1349), who also wrote against alche-my, was still active.102 Meanwhile, {Izz al-Din Aydamiral-Jildaki (d. 1342 or later) and others were writingnew alchemical texts and commentaries.103 When Is-lamic alchemists defended their art in words, theirforemost argument was that the secret of alchemymust exist, because it had once been known. There-

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fore, despite serious challenges, the argument con-tinued, hope must remain that the secret might berediscovered. Through its elaborate interactions withthe text, at the levels of allegorical illustration, au-thor-portrait frontispieces, and pictogram, the SilveryWater painting communicates the same idea. It in-troduces a visual dimension to our understanding ofa debate that has so far been studied only in termsof its verbal expression. In so doing, it serves as aparticularly compelling example of the close relation-ship between painting and intellectual life in theeastern Islamic lands in the first century of Mongolrule.

Harvard UniversityCambridge, Massachusetts

NOTES

Author’s note: I have been fortunate to receive the help of manypeople during the preparation of this article. I am grateful tothe libraries and museums that granted me permission to pub-lish works in their care, and particularly to Dr. Filiz Ca¯man ofthe Topkapæ Saray Museum. I also wish to thank Julia Bailey, NikosChrissidis, Jeffrey Hamburger, Ioli Kalavrezou, Jean Monroe,Gülru Necipo¯lu, Christine Philliou, András Riedlmayer, Eliza-beth Ross, David Roxburgh, and Wheeler Thackston for thevarious ways their criticism and assistance have enriched thisarticle. All mistakes are of course my own.

1. The manuscript, Topkapæ Palace Museum, Istanbul, A. 2075,contains 79 folios. The painting, on fols. 2b–3a, measuresa total of 14.5 x 21.0 cm. The manuscript has been catalo-gued in Fehmi Edhem Karatay, Topkapæ Sarayæ Müzesi Kütüp-hanesi Arapça Yazmalar Katalo¯u, vol. 4 (Istanbul, 1962), cat.no. 8717, p. 392. See notes 66–67 below for a more exten-sive description of the short texts at the end of the manu-script.

2. Scholars have noted that it is surprising to see this long bodytype at such an early date, because the best-known examplesare found in Jalayirid manuscripts dating from the end ofthe fourteenth century. Stefano Carboni, “Synthesis: Conti-nuity and Innovation in Ilkhanid Art,” in Linda Komaroffand Stefano Carboni, eds., The Legacy of Genghis Khan: CourtlyArt and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353 (New York: TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), pp. 222–23, fig. 271;Ernst J. Grube, Persian Painting in the Fourteenth Century: AResearch Report, vol. fasc. 4, supp. no. 17, Istituto Orientale deNapoli 38 (1978), pp. 18–19, fig. 4; idem, “The Kalilah waDimna of the Istanbul University Library and the Problemof Early Jalairid Painting,” in Akten des VII. InternationalenKongresses für Iranische Kunst und Archäologie, München, 7.–10. September 1976 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1979), p. 497, fig. 7.

3. For a discussion of the similarities and distinctions betweenal-nafs and al-r¢¥, including an analysis of these terms as

philosophical concepts according to the author Qusta b. Luqa(d. 912), see The Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v., “Soul. Islamicconcepts.”

4. My thanks to Wheeler Thackston, who helped me read thisinscription.

5. Carboni, “Synthesis,” pp. 222–23, fig. 271; Grube, PersianPainting in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 18–19, fig. 4; Grube,“Kalilah wa Dimna”: 491–507, p. 497, fig. 7. In support ofthis attribution, I would add the observation that, like thestylistic properties of the painting, the preponderance ofArabic in a manuscript that also includes Persian furthersuggests the province of Iraq. The inclusion of a few pas-sages in the manuscript in Persian points to lands in theeastern half of the Islamic world that were under Mongoldomination, where Persian was then emerging as the ma-jor literary language. Yet the fact that the bulk of the text isin Arabic suggests the province of Iraq, where, at least inthe first century of Mongol rule, cultural continuity with thepre-Mongol past seems to have been stronger than in otherlands under Mongol rule. Much more remains to be saidon this issue, but for evidence of cultural continuity in Iraqimmediately following the conquest, see Marianna ShreveSimpson, “The Role of Baghd¸d in the Formation of Per-sian Painting,” in Art et société dans le monde iranien, ed.Chahryar Adle (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations,1982): 91–116; and Keith Weissman, “Mongol Rule in Bagh-dad, Evidence from the Chronicle of Ibn al-Fuwati: 656 to700 A.H. /1258 to 1301 C.E.,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chi-cago, 1990).

6. Within the text block, the calligrapher has used differentscripts as he switches among the various kinds of texts inArabic prose, Arabic poetry, and Persian prose. Yet the tran-sitions between these different scripts are sometimes gradualrather than abrupt, and the examination of particular let-ters in the different texts indicates that they are all the workof the same hand.

7. For all three interrelated texts, see Muhammad bin Umail,Three Arabic Treatises on Alchemy, Arabic edition of the textsby M. Turab {Ali, published in one volume with H. E.Stapleton and M. Hidayat Husain, “Excursus on the Writ-ings and Date of Ibn Umail with Edition of the Latin Ren-dering of the M¸} al-waraqº,” Memoirs of the Asiatic Society ofBengal 12, 1: 1–213. A. 2075 was not among the manuscriptsconsulted for this edition, but the full introductory allegoryas it appears there (A. 2075, fols. 1b–2a) has been transcribedand published by Fuat Sezgin, “Üç macm¸{at ar-ras¸}il,” Isl¸mTetkikleri Enstitüsü Dergisi: Review of the Institute of Islamic Studies2, 2–4 (1958): 231–256, pp. 244–45. As compared to the {Aliedition, a few lines of Ris¸lat al-shams il¸ al-hil¸l appear in adifferent order in A. 2075. And as in one of the five manu-scripts consulted by {Ali, the section of prose published onpp. 51 and 52, as well as several of the short poems, is notincluded in the commentary in A. 2075.

8. Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften imIslam. Abt. l, Erg.-Bd. 6, Abschnitt 2, Handbuch der Orientalistik(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), n. 1, p. 219. My thanks to NikosChrissidis, who translated the Greek terms in the note forme.

9. The term “mercury-sulfur” is a loose designation, since it isnot clear exactly what chemical substances (if any) were being

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discussed. Georges C. Anawati, “Arabic Alchemy,” in Ency-clopedia of the History of Arabic Science, ed. Roshdi Rashed(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 853–85, p. 866; EI2, s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.”

10. Julius Ruska, “Der Urtext der Tabula Chemica,” Archeion 16(1934): 273–83. Idem, “Studien zu Mu¥ammad Ibn Umailal-Tamºmº’s Kit¸b al-M¸} al-Waraqº wa}l-Ar¤ an-Najmºyah,” Isis24, 2 (1936): 310–42.

11. See Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Al-chemical Magus, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Phanes Press, 1995).

12. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, ms. Rh. 172, fol. 3a. Barbara Obristhas analyzed this painting with reference to Ibn Umayl’s textand has published it in color in Les débuts de l’imageriealchemique (14e–15e siècles) (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), pp.189–208, fig. 49.

13. Vol. 5 of Zetzner’s Theatrum Chemicum, Argentorati, 1622.Stapleton and Husain, “Excursus,” p. 146: present locationunknown.

14. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ms. arabe 2610, fol. 3a. {Ali,Three Treatises, pl. 2b; trans. {Ali, pl. 1.

15. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 2–4; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 244, lines17–20. Published translations of the introduction includeStapleton and Husain in {Ali, Three Treatises, pp. 119–21(English); Ruska, “Studien,” pp. 311–13 (German); andB. H. Stricker, “La Prison de Joseph,” Acta Orientalia (1942):101–137, pp. 101–105 (French). For translation of all passagesfrom the allegory, I have used the existing translation byStapleton and Husain, making adjustments as necessary. Ihave called attention to significant changes of meaning. In-scriptions and quotes from parts of the A. 2075 manuscriptother than the introduction are my translations unless other-wise noted.

16. Birb¸} is spelled without hamza in the inscription over thedoor, but with hamza in the text of the manuscript. Stapletonand Husain translated birb¸} as “pyramid,” but Stricker,“Prison,” Ruska, “Studien,” and Farès agree that it is anancient temple. Bishr Farès, “Figures magiques,” in Aus derWelt der islamischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ernst Kühnel (Berlin,1959), pp. 154–62.

17. {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 1; see EI2, s.v., “B¢ªºr or Ab¢ªºr.”18. Faivre, Eternal Hermes, pp. 89–92.19. Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina (Heidelberg, 1926) pp. 138–

39; Faivre, Eternal Hermes, pp. 93–94.20. This figure, in the Islamic world and in Europe, was a com-

posite of the Latin Mercury/Greek Hermes and the Egyp-tian God Thoth; see Faivre, Eternal Hermes. In Islamic traditionhe was also identified with other individuals, the most im-portant of whom in the present context are Enoch (Akh-nukh) and Idris. EI2, s.v., “Hirmis.”

21. EI2, s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.” Nathan Sivin describes a similar situ-ation in the history of Chinese alchemy. He comments that“the issue was not progress in knowledge but regainingancient wisdom.” Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v., “Alchemy.Chinese alchemy.”

22. For Islamic alchemy see EI2, s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.” For the sameidea in other alchemical traditions, see The Encyclopedia ofReligion, s.v., “Alchemy.”

23. EI2, s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.”24. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study

(World of Islam Festival Publishing Company, 1976), p. 197.25. Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no. 9281, 197 x 90 cm. Pub-

lished in Mikhail Piotrovsky, ed., Zemnoe iskusstvo, nebesnaiakrasota: iskusstvo islama: Earthy [sic] Art, Heavenly Beauty: Artof Islam (St. Petersburg: Slavii, 2000), cat. no. 105.

26. Qur}an 12: 21. In one of the appended texts of the 1339manuscript, the “Dream of Tughra}i,” the maker(s) of themanuscript took up the idea that the legitimacy of alchemywithin Islam could be linked to the sanctioned interpreta-tion of dreams and stories. In that text, Tughra}i receivesthe ability and responsibility to study alchemy while convers-ing with the Prophet Muhammad in a dream.

27. Stricker, “Prison,” pp. 118–35. Stricker argues further thatthe Prison of Yusuf should be specifically identified with aTemple of Imhotep/Asklepios at Memphis (pp. 107–18). Thisis an interesting suggestion because, as Ullmann notes,Yuhanna b. al-Bitriq supposedly found the Kit¸b sirr al-asr¸r(The Book of Secrets) in that very temple. (Ullmann, Natur-,p. 219, n. 3).

28. As an example of the place of alchemy in the thinking ofbroader systems of falsafa (philosophy), it may be noted thatthe Ikhwan al-Safa} considered alchemy a means to elimi-nate harm and poverty. EI2, s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.” On the de-bate over the place of philosophy and the “foreign sciences”generally in Islamic thought, see Majid Fakhry, A History ofIslamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,1970).

29. Obrist interpreted this as a contemporary expression of thecult status of alchemy in ancient Egypt, where the priestsof the temples had a monopoly on such crafts as dyeing,and where the materials of the alchemical process were keptin the temples. Obrist, Débuts, pp. 202, 204.

30. Stapleton and Husain in {Ali, Three Treatises: “keepers” (p.119); Stricker, “Prison”: “les chercheurs de trésors” (p. 101);Ruska, “Studien”: “Forscher oder … Schatzgräber” (p. 311,n. 4).

31. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 4–6; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 244, lines20–22.

32. A. 2075 fol. 44a; {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 69. English transla-tion from H. E. Stapleton, G. L. Lewis, and F. SherwoodTaylor, “The Sayings of Hermes Quoted in the M¸} al-Waraqºof Ibn Umail,” Ambix 3, 3–4 (April 1949): 69–90, p. 82.

33. Obrist, Débuts, p. 210.34. Ibid., p. 195.35. Thomas Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Em-

pire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 77.36. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 6–8 and in the margin; Sezgin, ”Mac-

m¸{at,” p. 244, lines 22–24. The last sentence is in the mar-gin of A. 2075, in the same hand as the body of the text,but not in Sezgin’s transliteration. It is found in the pub-lished {Ali edition, p. 1. I follow Farès in his translation ofªanam as “idol.”

37. Allsen, Commodity, p. 91.38. British Library Or. 14140, {Aj¸}ib al-makhl¢q¸t wa-ghar¸}ib al-

mawj¢d¸t, ca. 1300, probably Mosul; LNS 9 MS, frontispiecefor Mu}nis al-a¥r¸r fº daq¸}iq al-ash{¸r, 1341, probably Isfahan:Carboni, “Synthesis,” figs. 257, 259, 261.

39. PP3, Keir Collection, England, probably Tabriz, 1330s. RobertHillenbrand, “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran,” inKamoroff and Carboni, eds., Legacy of Genghis Khan, fig. 186.

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On the peculiar position of Alexander, see Yriko Yamanaka,“Ambiguité de l’image d’Alexandre chez Firdawsº: les tracesdes traditions sassanides dans le Livre des Rois,” in Alexandrele Grand dans les littératures occidentales et proche-orientales, pp.341–354. (Paris: Centre des Sciences de la Littérature, 1999).

40. See fols. K3, K28, K29, and K33 from the Khalili manuscriptin Sheila S. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din’sIllustrated History of the World (Oxford, 1995).

41. Farès, “Figures magiques,” p. 158.42. My thanks to Jeffrey Hamburger and Ioli Kalavrezou for

sharing their thoughts on the style of this figure with me.43. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1179, fol.

1b.44. For such a figure, see fol. 1r of Vienna, Österreichische

Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2554. (Fol. 1r directly follows fol.Iv.) See Reiner Haussher, comm., and Hans-Walter Stork,trans., Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554 der Österreichi-schen Nationalbibliothek, Glanzlichter der Buchkunst, Bd. 2(Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlaganstalt, 1992).

45. Laurence Lockhart, “The Relations between Edward I andEdward II of England and the Mongol µl-Kh¸ns of Persia,”Iran 6 (1968): 23–31.

46. The identification of the figure in the allegory with Hermesis widely recognized.

47. Ruska, Tabula; Farès, “Figures magiques,” pp. 89–92.48. EI2, s.v., “Hirmis.”49. Stapleton, Lewis, and Taylor, “Sayings.”50. Obrist, Débuts, p. 200.51. It is, however, mentioned in some parallel versions of the

allegory, such as that of Crates. Obrist, Débuts, p. 200.52. Ibid.53. The painter may be playing on the ambivalent status of idols

as objects that are easily confused with truth. Michael Camille,“Idols in Society,” chap. 6 of The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989), pp. 242–97. If so, his implicit criticism of asimplistic equation of form and meaning echoes Ibn }Umayl’simpatient criticism of people who read alchemical texts lit-erally. He particularly criticizes followers of Jabir b. Hayyan.A. 2075 fol. 64a; ‘Ali, ed., Three Treatises, pp. 102–3.


55. Habibeh Rahim comments, “The elixirs … were the alche-mist’s medicines.” The Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v., “Alchemy.Islamic alchemy.”


57. On Islamic Neoplatonism and philosophy, see Fakhry, His-tory of Islamic Philosophy.

58. On the development of the Islamic author-portrait frontis-piece type from the late antique, and the resulting conno-tations of Islamic author-portrait frontispieces, see EvaHoffman, “The Author Portrait in Thirteenth-Century Ara-bic Manuscripts: A New Islamic Context for a Late AntiqueTradition,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 6–20.

59. See note 20, above.60. Hoffman, “Author Portrait,” p. 9.61. Ibn Umayl’s evident familiarity with the author-portrait fron-

tispiece genre interestingly falls towards the beginning ofthe period when the classical author portrait was being as-

similated into Islamic book culture, as described by Hoff-man, “Author Portrait,” p. 15.

62. The current position of the image on fol. 3a is misleadingbecause several of the folios that originally preceded it havebeen lost. Obrist, Débuts, pp. 188 and 276–77.

63. Philosophiae Chymicae 4: Ventustissima Scripta, Frankfurt 1605.Published in Ruska, “Studien.”

64. Three other images might be additional examples, but I havenot had the chance to determine whether they are now orever were positioned in books in such a way that they servedas frontispieces. (1) Farès, “Figures magiques,” offers anintriguing reference to a sketch in a manuscript dated 1218(1803–4) of Jildaki’s commentary on Ibn Umayl, Law¸mi{al-afk¸r al-mu¤iyya (The Splendors of the Lasting Ideas).Ahmad Taymur describes this sketch as an inartistic imagedepicting nine eagles with outstretched wings, below whichpeople point at a seated idol. Ahmad Taymur, al-Taªwºr {indaal-{Arab (Cairo, 1942), pp. 44, 185. (2) Obrist has publisheda fifteenth-century illustration of Hermes with his tablet,which, according to her very plausible suggestion, may haveserved as a model for the seventeenth-century frontispiecesmentioned above. It is now found in a manuscript that con-tains a cycle of alchemical illustration (Manchester, JohnRylands Library, ms. Germ 1, fol. 5b); see Obrist, Débuts, fig.98. (3) A similar composition, but surrounded by an elabo-rately populated frame, appears in another alchemicalmanuscript with watercolors, made between 1577 and 1583.Faivre, Eternal Hermes, pl. 11: Germanisches Nationalmuseum,Ms. 16752.

65. The scribe identifies the passage on fols. 65a–66b as, “thewords of Ibn Umayl, that we found in one of the copies ofhis book, Al-m¸} al-naqºy wa-al-{ar¤ al-najmiyya (The Pure Wa-ter and the Starry Earth).” Later, on fols. 71b–75b, there ap-pear some more poems by Ibn Umayl, including his al-Qaªºdaal-n¢niyya.

66. Ibn Umayl’s sources are represented by the anonymous texton fols. 66b–67b, Mukhtaªar min kit¸b muª¥af kashf al-asr¸rlil-Aras {inda su}¸l Ta}¢durus (An Abridgment from the Book ofthe Disclosure of Aras’s Secrets upon the Inquiry of Theodoros);and by a passage attributed by the scribe to the Egyptianmystic and alchemist Dhu al-Nun al-Masri (d. 861), presentedin Persian translation on fols. 76b–79a. The text on fols. 66b–67b has not been published but is known in other manu-scripts. See Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schriftums,Band 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p. 69. Ullmann, Natur-,p. 190, mentions another title that presents the dialogue be-tween Ares and the Byzantine King Theodoros: Muª¥af al-¥ay¸t. The dialogue was mentioned in numerous alchemi-cal texts including al-M¸} al-waraqº. In A. 2075 fol. 76a, Dhual-Nun’s name is given in the Arabic accusative form, Dh¸al-N¢n, which explains his identification in the Karatay cata-logue as “Ab¢’l-Fay¾ Zann¢n.” On this author, see Ullmann,Natur-, pp. 196–97 and 392.

67. The scribe of A. 2075 included a ru}ya (dream) of Tughra}ion fols. 68b–69a, and also his untitled qaªºda of thirty verses,rhyming with the letter r¸}; this follows from fols. 69a to 70b.Tughra}i was a high-ranking administrator under the Seljuksand wrote several works on alchemy, the most famous ofwhich was Kit¸b ¥aq¸}iq al-istishh¸d (The Book of the Truths ofthe Quotations), a response to Ibn Sina’s attack on alchemy.

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EI2, s.v., “al-Þughr¸}º;” Mu}ayyid al-Din Abi Isma{il al-Husaynb. {Ali al-Tughra}i, Ýaq¸}iq al-istishh¸d, ed. Razzuq FarajRazzuq (Baghdad: D¸r al-Rashºd li-al-Nashr, 1982). The poemis not to be found in the published Dºw¸n of Tughra}i. AbiIsma}il al-Husayn b. {Ali al-Tughra}i, Dºw¸n, ed. {Ali Jawwadal-Tahir wa-Yahya al-Jaburi (Baghdad: Wiz¸rat al-I{l¸m al-Jumh¢riyya al-{Ir¸qiyya, 1976). As for the continuation ofthe alchemical tradition after Ibn Umayl’s death, this is rep-resented in passages by Mu}ayyid al-Din al-Tughra}i (d. 515/1121). In the Karatay catalogue, this text is identified asMukhtaªar Ris¸lat fº al-Kimiy¸ [sic] (The Abridgment of the Treatiseon Alchemy) of Tughra}i. However, it is identified as Ru}ya atthe top of fol. 68b and among the inscriptions listing thecontents of the manuscript on fol. 1a; and as Ru}y¸ at thebottom of fol. 69a. In the text, Tughra}i specifies that thiswas a vision of sleep (fol. 68b line 5).

68. Obrist, Débuts, 186–87.69. Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v., “Alchemy. Elixirs.”70. A. 2075 fol. 2a, lines 8–10; Sezgin, ‘Macm¸{at,” p. 245, lines

17–19.71. Obrist, Débuts, p. 195.72. Hoffman, “Author Portrait,” p. 12.73. The painting, from manuscript A III 2127 in the library of

the Topkapæ Palace, is published in color in Richard Etting-hausen, Arab Painting (Geneva: Skira, 1962), pp. 68–69.

74. Obrist, Débuts, p. 202.75. As in the {Ali edition, Three Treatises, not daww¸b as in the

transcription appearing in Sezgin’s “Macm¸{at.”76. khu«¢« bi-al-qalam al-birb¸wº. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 12–13;

Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 244, lines 29–30.77. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 13–17; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 244, line

30–p. 245, line 4.78. The Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v., “Alchemy. Chinese alchemy.”79. Historical Dictionary of Taoism, s.v., “Inner Alchemy.”80. Allsen, Commodity; idem, Culture and Conquest in Mongol

Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).81. Chih-ch’ang Li, The Travels of an Alchemist: The Journey of the

Taoist Ch’ang-ch’un from China to the Hindukush at the Sum-mons of Chingiz Khan, Recorded by His Disciple, Li Chih-ch’ang,trans. Arthur Waley (New York: AMS Press, 1979).

82. E.g., A. 2075 fol. 15a, line 12; {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 21, lines15–16.


84. A. 2075 fol. 3b, line 8; {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 3, line 15.85. Obrist, Débuts, pp. 21–33, analyzes how this idea affected the

iconography of alchemical images in the West.86.The possibility that this figure might represent Maria the

Jew, who belonged to a “second tier” of early alchemicalauthorities after Hermes, does not seem viable. Maria ismentioned in the commentary, but if the figure in the paint-ing is Maria, then either she should be dressed in “antique”

garb as is the sage/ Hermes sculpture, or else the four fig-ures below her should represent four other specific sec-ondary alchemical authorities. It is not clear from thecommentary who these four would be.

87. A. 2075 fol. 1b, lines 18–19; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 245,lines 6–7.

88. The phrase wa-shu{¸ al-w¸¥id ({Ali, Three Treatises, p. 2, line10) does not appear in the A. 2075 manuscript.

89. A. 2075 fol. 1b, line 19–fol. 2a, line 6; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,”p. 245, lines 7–14.

90. Obrist, Débuts, counted the faces in the bottom circle andsuggested that the three faces at the bottom should beadded to the two suns at the top.

91. The painter apparently decided to give an overview of theintersecting rays of the suns and their effect on the moonfrom the point of view of an observer in the sky. This wouldexplain why the crescent shape in the painting is in shadowrather than illuminated. The tradition of visualizing thecelestial bodies from both the earth and the sky was wellestablished.

92. A. 2075 fol. 32b, lines 15–18; {Ali, ed., Three Treatises, p.50, lines 11–15.

93. A. 2075 fol. 2a, line 17: min al-dhakar wa-al-}unth¸. Sezgin,“Macm¸{at,” p. 245, line 28, omits }unth¸.

94. A. 2075 fol. 2a, lines 17–19; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 245,last paragraph. The passage does not appear in the {Ali,Three Treatises edition.

95. A. 2075 fol. 58a; {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 92.96. A. 2075 fol. 2a, lines 6–7; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p. 245, lines

14–15.97. li-taqif {alayhi.98. A. 2075 fol. 2a, lines 7–8, 10–12; Sezgin, “Macm¸{at,” p.

245, lines 16–17, 19–21.99. EI2 s.v., “al-Kºmiy¸}.”100. The manuscript made its way into the Ottoman library,

and we know that it circulated after it got there becauseof an Ottoman inscription at the beginning (2 pages be-fore fol. 1a) that says, “It is the book that Zeyrek Agachecked out” (~çerüden Zeyrek A¯a çikardu¯s kitâbdur). Mythanks to Gülru Necipo¯lu, who read and translated thisOttoman inscription for me. Zeyrek Aga and other indi-viduals who checked books out from the Ottoman libraryare discussed in a dissertation-in-progress by Emine Fet-vaci.

101. A. 2075 fol. 11b; {Ali, Three Treatises, p. 15102. John W. Livingston, “Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya: A Fourteenth-

Century Defense against Astrological Divination and Al-chemical Transmutation,” Journal of the American OrientalSociety (Jan.–Mar. 1971): 96–103. For more sources on thecontroversy see EI2, s.v, “al-Kºmiy¸},” and Georges C.Anawati, “Arabic Alchemy,” pp. 853–85.

103. Ullmann, Natur-, pp. 237–42.

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Painting as Persuasion' a Visual Defense of Alchemy in an Islamic Manuscript of the Mongol Period