They were not Christians.

They were not Christians.” And what did they call their art? This knotty problem is conspicuous by its absence in Taylor's book. When Wilson[^2] came to review it, he supplied the missing information on “the derivation of the Greek name of the art.” “The word unmistakably goes back to the craft of the foundryman and metal-worker.

First, there is the Greek verb cheo (xiw), to melt and pour, as in the casting of a bronze statue, then its derivative chump, an ingot of cast metal, and finally from this another derivative chumeia, the art of preparing metal ingots. This in time became a technical term for the artificial preparation of the precious metals, but at first, as in Zosimus, about 300 A.D., it acquired a qualifying phrase, the chumeia of silver or gold.

Before the Arabic period, however, chumeia could stand alone to denote the art of transmutation. Also before Arabic times, about 81/700 or earlier, it seems to have been confused with chemia, apparently a Greek derivative of the Egyptian word chem, meaning black. The reasons are obscure but the fact of the confusion is hardly to be questioned.

Later, the Arabs took over both spellings, chumeia and chemia, prefixed their own definite article al, and handed the word on to the Europeans in about the sixth/twelfth century.” Thus kimiya is the Arabicized form of the dual word chumeia/chemia.

The Greek and Arabic Terms Compared.-Now it is even more important to know what the Arabs received under the name kimiya from the Greek­speaking alchemists-to know what the word chemeia signifies and how the Arabic word kimiya compares with it in meaning.

Gildemeister[^3] explains that “kimiya with the Arabs primarily is not an abstraction (or the science of alchemy) but the name of a substance, of an agent, by which transmutation of metals is brought about, thus of the Philosophers' Stone, or rather of preparations made out of it. It is thus a synonym of ilcsir which likewise signifies a transforming agent.

By contrast chumeia is never used by the Greeks in any other sense than transmutation of metals.”[^4] There are two synonyms in Greek, chemeia and chumeia. Gildemeister refers to the use only of the latter, apparently taking it as identical with the former. In Arabic there are two terms kimiya and iksir, the latter not being represented in Greek literature. In fact, iksir occurs far more in Arabic than the word kimiya.